I remember the first time I walked into the RHS Lindley Library. It was cold, so it must have been winter, and the trees of London’s Vincent Square were playing with the light through the building’s tall windows. I felt woefully out of place walking over that beautiful mosaic floor, but the librarians just smiled and nodded towards the entrance.
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I was there to look for a particular book – Sarah Whittingham’s Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania. And there it was on a shelf, neatly filed with its Dewey system sticker. I was researching my own book at the time, looking at how different generations came to find their own way to plants, while exploring my own nascent fascination with them. I was done with Whittingham’s excellent book within a few days, but I returned to Vincent Square to research and then write in the months that followed. Fast-forward a few years and a copy of my own book appeared in the Lindley Library, back where it began.
I was undergoing my own ferny fascination
I wanted to find out – and write – about pteridomania, the Victorian craze for ferns that saw them embroidered on to dresses and printed on to cushions, painted on ceramics and meticulously etched into custard cream biscuits (they’re still there, those little curlicues). I was undergoing my own ferny fascination. I wasn’t rampaging around the country with a little trowel and a collection box, as did so many middle-class women in the 19th century, destroying swathes of biodiversity in the process, but I did fill my balcony with them. One late summer day, I even got the delicate leaves of a maidenhair fern (Adiantum raddianum) inked on to the inside of my bicep.
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That was seven years ago and I’ve still no regrets – about the tattoo or becoming a pteridophile. The adiantums live in the garden now; A. venustum is a resilient little thing, pushing on through the seasons. The affectionately named, formerly indoor, Princess Maidenhair Fern V (the numeral should tell you how tricky they are to keep alive in British homes) finally succumbed to life outdoors and its pot now houses foxglove seedlings. Those ferns that filled my balcony now stand by my back door, still in the same containers. They’ve been divided endlessly and scattered around.
After a dismal, mollusc-filled summer, I realised I’d overlooked the most crucial part of making a garden: growing your favourite plants
It took me a while to accept that happiness lay in simply putting more ferns in the garden. When we moved from our flat to a house, I devoured the plant catalogues, and tried growing dozens of things I hadn’t previously had the space for, and had coveted on other gardeners’ Instagram accounts. A kind of existential, dahlia-filled crisis ensued. After a dismal, mollusc-filled summer, I realised I’d overlooked the most crucial part of making a garden: growing your favourite plants. So I ordered a lucky-dip box of five different ferns from peat-free grower Penlan Perennials, and set about planting them. They thrived, filling up and fronding out and helping to create the calming layers of green texture and movement that I cherish most in a garden.
Admittedly, February isn’t the ideal time to do much to ferns. I only grow hardy types, and if they’re deciduous, their nascent beauty is still tucked beneath rusting fronds. We must wait for May, when new fiddleheads appear from the fluffy, brown casings at the crown of the plant. It is one of my most-loved gardening moments of the year. When we landscaped last year, I saved the ferns, not fully knowing where they would end up. But once the dust had settled, I realised we’d unintentionally made space for them in a light-dappled corner by the studio. Here, I began to plant all the divisions and previously potted things. Finally, a fernery of my own.