CLARA WOOLFORD: Ferns were considered to be safe because

they were essentially asexual. So if your daughter or your wife

was very into ferns, that was considered far less stimulating

than if she was into something like orchids that Victorians

felt looked particularly sensual.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Today we're travelling back to an age of

discovery. It's the mid-1800s and Britain has succumbed to a

mania for collecting leafy green non-flowering plants, ferns. And

this new nature craze is about to be taken to the extreme. I'm

Ranger Rosie Holdsworth. Welcome to Wild Tales, Pterodomania,

when Fern Frenzy swept the UK.

Are you a proud houseplant parent? I love putting my plants

in the shower to water them and pretend that I live in a

rainforest. I've got a lot of enthusiasm for all my plant

babies, but I do get out of my depth caring for them.

Houseplants are a huge trend amongst millennials and gen z.

We largely owe our modern green-fingered habits to the

Victorians' total obsession with botany. And pterodomania, or

Fern Frenzy, was one of the biggest crazes of all time. So

who were the pterodomaniacs? Why was Fern Frenzy really a lot

about sex? And what can we learn about the conservation

consequences when the craze went too far?

CLARA WOOLFORD: Pterodomaniacs or Fern hunters, they would

really go to extremes to collect the best specimens and get quite

competitive about it.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This is Clara Walford, curator at Cragside in

Northumberland.

CLARA WOOLFORD: One of the people that we know a lot about

is a gentleman called Charles Drury. He writes about how on

one expedition in Devonshire, and Devonshire was the place to

go fern hunting

he tries to dislodge what he calls a very desirable heart's

tongue fern that's growing out the side of a bridge that's

spanning a really fast flowing stream.

Because he can't get to it he decides to lean over the side

with a trowel, which he's lashed to a stick and then sort of

pokes the fern out and catches it in an open umbrella that he

suspended underneath the arch of the bridge with a piece of

string. And then has to wade into the river to retrieve this

fern.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So how exactly did the fern craze start?

CLARA WOOLFORD: Pteridomania, which is really hard to say and

it's even harder to spell because it has a silent P at the

start, it basically means fern madness. And it was coined in

1855 by a writer and a botanist called Charles Kingsley. He is

most well known for his fairy tale, The Water Babies, but it

really takes over the whole of Victorian society in a way that

is quite unbelievable.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: For the Victorians, collecting and

categorising things was an obsession and way of life. This

was applied to lots of things and especially natural history.

CLARA WOOLFORD: It's obviously the period of Charles Darwin.

This is the era of taxonomy and working out family trees between

different species. It's a period where they are discovering and

exploring the world.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Ferns themselves are an ancient plant

recognisable by their feathery leaves or fronds. The plant life

first appeared around 400 million years ago before the

time of the dinosaurs.

Around 60 varieties grow in the UK. Bracken is the most common

fern. And we have lots of other species with fun names like

brittle bladder, scaly male and maidenhair. Maidenhair, by the

way, is not named after the hair on your head.

And in the 19th Century, a culmination of social conditions

means it's suddenly easy for hobbies like fern hunting to go

viral.

CLARA WOOLFORD: It goes from that kind of intellectual elite

down to people in their own homes collecting. And I think

it's also a sign of that period that there's mass media, there's

journals for just about every hobby and interest. And that

actually is probably quite similar to us today with, you

know, things like Pinterest and TikTok, and you can find your

community.

And thanks to things like the railway, so this brilliant new

technology, the British countryside is suddenly far more

accessible to ordinary people. There was all sorts of fern

hunting paraphernalia that was marketed as well.

So you could buy specialist trowels and little specimen pots

to put your ferns in because you had to try and keep them alive

on the journey home. Albums of specimens, special cases that

they'd make, they'd make tiny museums in their homes. It's

really encouraged and a real kind of fashionable thing to be

doing.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So who were these fashionable

pterodomaniacs?

CLARA WOOLFORD: The Victorian fern craze gets very associated

with young women. Charles Kingsley, who coins the term,

how he describes it is slightly patronising. So he says, Your

daughters perhaps have been seized with the prevailing

pteridomania, wrangling over unpronounceable names of species

which seem different in every new fern book that they buy.

And yet you cannot deny that they find enjoyment in it and

are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it than

they would have been over novels, gossip, crochet and

Berlin wool.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Victorian society also wanted to associate

young women with ferns for another reason. Ferns are

asexual and so deemed appropriate plants for the

sensitive female mind.

CLARA WOOLFORD: It's considered a more wholesome activity

because ferns don't flower. It wasn't really understood how

ferns reproduced and around this period is when they start to

understand the idea of spores.

But essentially, unlike a flowering plant that has sexual

organs, that idea that bees have to come and pollinate a

flowering plant, the Victorians who saw sex everywhere, that had

connotations that they didn't want to associate with young

ladies.

Whereas ferns were considered to be safe in that regard because

they were essentially asexual. So if your daughter or your wife

was very into ferns, that was considered far less stimulating

than if she was into something like orchids. That Victorians

felt looked particularly sensual.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The Victorians might have wanted to stop young

women botanists getting sex into their heads, but young women had

something else in mind.

CLARA WOOLFORD: Fern hunting was something that could be done as

a group of men and women, which was quite unusual for the

Victorian period. This is because young women very into

ferns, if they wanted to go out into the British countryside, it

would be highly inappropriate for them to do that

unchaperoned. So it's also a very physical activity. So it

might not be something where they're taking along a more

elderly female relative.

So they're being accompanied by young men. But it was well

acknowledged that these groups were often being used for more

illicit assignations. Punch magazine was a really popular

satirical magazine, they print in 1869 an article that suggests

that botanising, which is the term they use, which I love, is

a good way of exploring less frequented spots with what they

refer to as a'blooming companion'.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It's not just young women who get in on fern

frenzy. It's everywhere. At its peak in the mid-1800s, fern

parties are so common they're competing for the same patches

in the British countryside.

As with many of our obsessions, people take the fern craze to

the extreme, and there are very real consequences. There are

stories from the era of unlucky fern collectors whose bodies are

discovered at the bottom of cliffs after going too far to

reach the best ferns.

And then of course, there are the serious conservation

consequences to the ferns themselves. Ferns play an

important role in the ecosystem. Growing where very little else

can, they provide shelter and shade for other species and

their structure protects against soil erosion. So stripping them

en masse from their habitats is a big environmental problem.

CLARA WOOLFORD: So Edward Lowe, who was a very famous fern

breeder in the 1890s, despairs of fern gangs. So there are

literally gangs of raiders going out into the English countryside

and stealing ferns, collecting ferns en masse to sell them on.

They were also stealing them from private estates. And others

were noting that ferns in Kent and Devon were becoming nearly

extinct. Large areas of the British countryside are being

stripped of ferns and they're not being able to reproduce fast

enough.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And there was the complicated issue of

colonial plant hunters taking ferns from other countries. This

was often done without any consideration for conservation

or permission from local communities.

CLARA WOOLFORD: So people that are being tasked to bring these

ferns back for nurseries to sell, they're just stripping out

ferns and other plants from ecosystems without any

consideration about what that impact might be. So there's not

a thought given to what happens if you take away all of the

breeding plants from an area in one go.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: By the end of the 19th century, fern frenzy

has got everywhere. Fern designs and patterns appear on

everything from curtains to garden benches to crockery. And

you might not have even noticed the ferns on one of the nation's

favourite treats.

CLARA WOOLFORD: That curly, swirly pattern on a custard

cream, that's actually fern fronds so every time you're

eating a custard cream you're part of that fern mania cult.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Fern frenzy's legacy is still found in how we

behave today. The Victorian's influence can be seen in our

love of house plants and gardening. And like the

pterodomaniacs lots of us get really into our hobbies and

sharing and showing off our interests. But these days we

understand a lot more about conservation. Thankfully, many

common fern species are still a familiar sight in the British

countryside.

And we now know that the best way to enjoy ferns is to head

out into the places where they can grow undisturbed in their

ancient green glory.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Wild Tales. If you

want to explore the fern frenzy for yourself, Cragside in

Northumberland is home to one of the UK's best collections. You

can explore rockeries, grottoes and glasshouses in the expansive

gardens. For more from Wild Tales, follow us on your

favourite podcast app and find us on Instagram @wildtalesnt.

Why not share your own tales with the hashtag

wildtaleswednesdays? See you next time.

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