Flags and Ferns

NZ Truth, Issue 701, 23 November 1918, Page 5

Flags and Ferns

Are They German Decoration*? A big drapery firm m Queen-strejet, Auckland, intensely patriotic, wanted to celebrate the .declaration of Peac© m a fitting manner, so it crowded on© Bide of the window with dozens of flags of all the Allies that helped to hunt the Hun. In the opposite window, as a. set-off to the flags, it placed a number of preserved ferns. To "Truths rep. the fernery display was amusing-, as he contended that it was made up of what was probably the product of Germany, or Germanised, product, or process. The writer knows something about Germanised ferns, because he was connected indirectly with the industry m pre-war clays. A man named Tressider, a nurseryman*»ef Sydney, N.S.W., first saw the possibility of the preserved fern. He got m toueli with a German firm named Emil Friederioks, of Hamburg, who had a process by which the ferns, after being dried, were made to look as fresh and as green as they did ; when they grew m the gullies and gleris and mossy nooks. These ferns, generally.. .called 'the Bulll fern or gigantic niaiden hair, were gathered by boys and men at Gs per thousand: were dried and/ PACKED, OFF TO HAMBURG, whence- they came back as one sees them m the Auckland shops to-day. Millions and millions of ferns left Australia's shores to return Germanised, But whether these particular ferns iever saw Germany or were "treated"* elsewhere by the German process *>*" .scribe is not m a position to. say,'