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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