In the social world, fern motifs appeared early in primitive artwork and have long been used in architectural ornamentation as well. By the mid 1800s, hand in hand with the fashionable interest in the live plants themselves, enthusiasm for ferns as art spilled into every opportune and marketable manifestation from decorating chamber pots to fine china.While not as extensive, their decorative uses continue to be popular today. Scientifically,with their non-traditional reproductive system, ferns were very poorly understood botanically.Where were the flowers? And seeds? Speculation led to some fanciful theories, the most common being that the seeds, though there,were invisible. In turn this brought forth some magical connotations.

Per the Doctrine of Signatures that gave life’s issues and medical complaints a relationship with cures that were based on the visual attributes of plants, ferns with their “invisible seeds” offered, as oft quoted from Shakespeare (Henry IV, act 2, scene 1), the power to “walk invisible.” First, however, one had to catch the elusive seeds or “fairy dust.”Various theories, and one suspects a fair amount of revelry, surrounded the chase which was to be carried out on Midsummer Night’s Eve with the sprinkling of the invisible seed powers showering and ready to be caught precisely at midnight. Eventually, science caught up with the ferns. Their “dust” had long been noticed and sometimes confusedly considered as being pollen, but not otherwise related to propagation. And, as accidents will happen (and someone must be alert enough to appreciate the significance), in 1794 John Lindsay, a British surgeon stationed in Jamaica,noticed that after rains quantities of ferns emerged from freshly disturbed soil (the best incubation sites in the wild for ferns today as well). Curious, he sprinkledsome fern “dust” in a flower pot and soon discovered the development of the young plants’, liverwort-like, small heart-shaped fertile structures, known scientifically as the gametophyte (sexual) generation. In time, these produced fronds, convincing Lindsay that he had found the “fern seed.”He sent “dust”home to England along with sowing instructions, and fern propagation began in earnest at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew as well as in horticultural and botanical circles throughout the country.Nurseryman Conrad Loddiges is credited with being an early proponent of carrying on propagation for commercial purposes and was the first to experiment with and recognize the value of shipping plants in Wardian cases some years later.

Although the discovery of the “seeds” answered some questions, true knowledge of the fern life cycle was yet several research stages later. In 1844 Karl von Nägeli, a Swiss botanist, observed and described the presence of sperms in the intermediate generation. The egg-producing female structure was in turn discovered in 1848 (and rather impressively, hybridization shortly thereafter in 1853). Thus the alternation of generations, as we know it today, became science.