Chapter III: Curly Grass Family

SCHIZÆÀCEÆ

CURLY GRASS. _Schizàea pusílla_

Small, slender ferns with linear or thready leaves, the sterile, one to two inches high and tortuous or "curled like corkscrews"; fertile fronds longer, three to five inches, and bearing at the top about five pairs of minute, fruited pinnæ. Sporangia large, ovoid, sessile in a double row along the single vein of the narrow divisions of the fertile leaves, and provided with a complete apical ring. (_Schizæa_, from a Greek root meaning to split, alluding to the cleft leaves of foreign species.)

The curly grass is so minute that it is difficult to distinguish it when growing amid its companion plants, the grasses, mosses, sundews, club mosses, etc. The sterile leaves are evergreen. Pine barrens of New Jersey, Grand Lake, Nova Scotia, and in New Brunswick. Several new stations for the curly grass have recently been discovered in the southwest counties of Nova Scotia by the Gray Herbarium expedition, mostly in bogs and hollows of sandy peat or sphagnum.

CLIMBING FERN. HARTFORD FERN

_Lygòdium palmàtum_

"And where upon the meadow's breast
The shadow of the thicket lies."
BRYANT.

Fronds slender, climbing or twining, three to five feet long. The lower pinnæ (frondlets) sterile, roundish, five to seven lobed, distant in pairs with simple veins; the upper fertile, contracted, several times forked, forming a terminal panicle; the ultimate segments crowded, and bearing the sporangia, which are similar to those of curly grass, and fixed to a veinlet by the inner side next the base, one or rarely two covered by each indusium. (From the Greek meaning like a willow twig [pliant], alluding to the flexible stipes.)

Fifty years ago this beautiful fern was more common than at present. There was a considerable colony in a low, alluvial meadow thicket at North Hadley, Mass., not far from Mt. Toby, where we collected it freely in 1872. Many used to decorate their homes with its handsome sprays, draping it gracefully over mirrors and pictures. It was known locally as the Hartford fern. Greedy spoilers ruthlessly robbed its colonies and it became scarce, at least in the Mt. Toby region. In Connecticut a law was enacted in 1867 for its protection and with good results. But as Mr. C.A. Weatherby states in the American Fern Journal (Vol. II, No. 4), the encroachments of tillage (mainly of tobacco, which likes the same soil), are forcing it from its cherished haunts, thus jeopardizing its survival. Doubtless an aggressive agriculture is in part responsible for its scarcity in the more northern locality. It is still found here and there in New England, New York and New Jersey; also in Kentucky, Tennessee and Florida, but is nowhere common. The fertile portion dies when the spores mature, but the sterile frondlets remain green through the winter. A handsome species for the fernery in the house or out of doors.