NATURE NOTES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20252, 11 May 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

NATURE NOTES.

THE NATIONAL EMBLEM.

By J. DRUIIMOND, T.L.S., y.Z.S.

With the fern-lcaf for their national emblem. New Zealariders should acknowledge an obligation to have at least some acquaintance with (he multitude of plants known as ferns. They are one of tho largest groups of plants. There are from 5500 to 6000 kinds of them. Although favouring warm and moist climates, they are cosmopolitans. They find New Zealand so suitable to their tastes and requirements that they probably form a larger proportion of tho native vegetation here than in any other country. This may not be the case now, after areas have been swept by fire, but it was so before settlers came. There is no type of landscape in New Zealand that ferns do not grace.

Ferns are not demonstrative. They do not make friends readily. They are loss prone to speak about themselves than are their showier associates, the flowering plants, admittedly beautiful, but sometimes loud. Those who wish to know the ferns intimately must go to trouble, be patient, take time, accept polite rebuffs, but after acquaintance is established, and when it has ripened into friendship, the ferns unfold their histories, disclose their affairs, bring out their genealogies, and drop hints of an ancient lineage that stamps them as aristocrats. It must be confessed that they are not communicative as to the distant past. Still, they give palaeobotanists glimpses of their golden age, which man never knew. This was in the Carboniferous Period, in the era of Early Life, when the ferns and their allies greatly outnumbered all their associates. *• Tree-ferns of those days had trunks two feet or more in diameter, stood seventy feet high, wore glorious crowns of spreading fronds, and, in stateliness and majesty, rivalled even New Zealand's Silver King. Their glory departed gradually. They dwindled in size until they were tree-ferns no longer. Their' closest living relatives are a group of ferns only a few feet high, with clustered fronds. They are plentiful in the tropics, but are represented in New Zealand by a single species, the para, formerly used by the Maoris as a food plant, ijow swiftly becoming rare.

Introductions to these plants are offered by Dr. F. 0. Bower Emeritus, Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, in three volumes, entitled " The Ferns," the result of deep research and of high literary and scientific effort. In presentation of the thought and work of a school of investigators in biology, they are a classic. They have hard words for beginners, but when these are understood the clarity of Dr. Bower's style charms. The pages can be read and re-read, while the reader is shown the intricacies of the ferns' form and structure. Facts and arguments are marshalled skilfully. Beginning with the birth of a fern, the author goes into its life-history, and inquires into the inter-relationship of different kinds of ferns now living in all parts of the world, and their descent from ferns foUtidas fossils.

Among the ferns Dr. Bower mentions frequently ar§ members of the Gleichenia, named in honour of Baron P. von Gleichcn, a German botanist. They are straggling plants of medium size, not much like ordinary ferns. Amongst them are the umbrella fern and the Maoris, |wae-wae-kaka. Gleichenia has a remarkable distribution. It occurs on alpine peaks in the tropics. It flourishes in the rain forests of Mexico, in Costa liica, flic West Indies, along the Andes to the Falkland Islands, from Natal to Table Mountain, in Madagascar, Reunion Island, Amsterdam Island, New Guinea, Patagonia, China, Japan, Australia, New Caledonia and Malaya. The wae-wae-kaka, in New Zealand, extends from North Cape southwards, is plentiful in the North Island, rare and local south of Cook Strait, and ranges from sea level to 2000 ft. In Australia it is a common fern.. The umbrella fern also is plentiful in the North Island, but not in the South Island, but is ascends from sea level lo 4000 ft., and it seems to be confined to New Zealand. Strangely, the Gleichenia are absent from Northern Africa, from the whole of Europe, from Western Asia, and from almost the whole of North America. Yet fossils speak of this family of ferns having been, in past ages, spread fairly widely in the Northern Hemisphere. In Cretaceous times, characterised by an extraordinary development of reptile life, ferns hardly distinguishable from some living Gleichana were particularly abundant in Western Greenland far within the Arctic Circle.

A two-headed Silver King, which grows in the Botanical Garden, Glasgow, is honoured by its photograph being used as the frontispiece of the first volume of Dr. Bowers's series, and the Silver King is referred to not infrequently in the volumes under its more imposing official title, Cyathea dealbata. Its domain is all New Zealand from North Cape to Foveaux Strait and to the Chatham Islands. In Lord Howe Island, it- has an overseas dominion. It rules' no other parts of the world. Standing perhaps, thirty feet high, silvered on the under-surfaces of the spreading fronds, it is one of the most kingly ferns. Its cousin, the black tree-fern, Cyathea medullaris. with fronds twenty feet .long and a slender black trunk ornamented with a formal six-sided pattern that runs rojind the trunk diagonally, may stand fifty feet high or more, one of the tallest tree-ferns in the world. Side by side with these stately monarchs in New Zealand there may grow a rare filmyfern, pale, delicate, pellucid, glistening green, whoso fronds sometimes stretch out eight inches, but sometimes are only two inches lons.

Dr. Bower does not mention New Zealand's most beautiful fern, the Frince of Wales' Feather, which lives in some of this Dominion's dense, moist forests, and nowhere else except in cultivation. Its fame is so great that it is often seen in ferneries in Europe. Mr. IT. P., Dobbie. of Auckland, who knows all New Zealand's best ferns, states that no feathers ever worn by any Prince of Wales can compare with its crown of sweeping plumes, the younger ones, transcluccnt, shiny green, rising majestically in the centre. For many years the Princo of Wales' Feather has been known as Todea superba. It now appears in the literature of the ferns as

Leptoptcris superba. The name of Ilerr Tode, of Mecklenburg, an eminent student of the fungi, was not removed h irn the Princo of Wales' Feather during the war, but at the demand of the laws of botanical nomenclature, which are inexorable.

There is no end to the study of ferns. This is its greatest fascination. These three volumes represent a prolonged study by Dr. Bower, but they mark only a stage in detailed investigation. The spirit of inquiry is still abroad. Dr. Bower's aim is advance rather than finality, llis motto is K. L. Stevenson's saying, "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive," which applies particularly to a study of this sort. Dr. Bowet has travelled hopefully along a path bewildering in attractions. His goal was an El Dorado of knowledge. In pursuing it he doubtless experienced many joys, which await others who follow the way,