Virtual Gardener

Lidderdale: The Fern Gatherer

This past summer, the Virtual Gardener fell in love with ferns. She is not the first to succumb to their charms. In the Victorian era, pteridomania was a craze which obsessed England at every level of society, from the Royal family to impoverished farm workers.

Wiki tells us that “the word is a portmanteau of the biological name for ferns and ‘mania’ in the sense of a craze”; in other words, pteridomania was a passion for ferns. It manifested in a huge range of ways, from going on collecting expeditions to gather specimens, to including fern motifs on every decorative object imaginable. The term was coined in 1855 by author Charles Kingsley: “Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’ and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species and yet you cannot deny that they find enjoyment in it.”

What better amusement in this Season of Wonders might there be than to create a “Cabinet of Wonders?”

Click to enlarge

No ordinary piece of furniture, but a repository of the unusual and the remarkable, Cabinets of Wonder have contained objects of ethnographic or archeological interest, religious or historical relics, and medical oddities.

What is this gardener’s bane? Worse than weeds, the mosquito can damage my garden by keeping me out of it! There are some 63 species of mosquitoes living here in New Jersey. Some will travel just a few yards for a meal, others can fly as far as 50 miles. The potential for contracting St. Louis Encephalitis, Eastern Equine Encephalitis or West Nile Virus through a mosquito bite makes them more than a simple pest.

This year, fragrance is the Plant Sale’s theme. Likewise, it is the topic of programming for Garden State Gardens (www.gardenstategardens.org) and for a new cell phone tour here at The Frelinghuysen Arboretum. To get you up to speed, follow your nose to these sites.

Start at coty.com to learn about our funder’s history.