shuttlecocks to land in the woodcock-haunted shelter. The tangle of
their fronds was chin high and you smashed your way through their woody
stipes with difficulty, so strong and thick were they. Now they have
vanished and scarcely a trace of their presence remains. Brown and
brittle stalks rise a little from the earth here and there, and if you
search among fallen leaves you may find the ends of their rootstalks
with the growth for next year coiled in compact bundles there, ready to
unfold.
From these rootstalks spring in all directions slender underground
runners whence will grow new plants. But none of this is visible. The
only reminder of that once luxurious thicket is the brittle, brown
stalks that still, here and there, protrude from the fallen leaves.
It is difficult to see where they all went, but there is something
savoring of the supernatural about ferns, anyway. Shakspeare says: “We
have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible.” For men to use this
receipt the seed must be garnered on St. John’s eve in a white napkin
with such and such incantations properly recited. The _Struthiopteris
germanica_ had plenty of fern-seed on St. John’s eve. It must have used
the old-time incantations with success, for all the giant shuttlecocks
that thronged the swale with a close-set tangle of feathery green have
vanished.
I sought another moist and shady woodland where all the early spring the
ground was a warm pinky brown with the fuzz of uncurling fiddle heads,
and later the brown, leaf-carpeted earth was hidden in a delicate lace
patterned of the young fronds of the cinnamon and the interrupted fern.
To this woodland came the yellow-warblers for the soft fuzz for use in
nest building, it compacting readily into a felt-like mass that is at
once yielding and durable. The cinnamon fern when it has reached any
size has an underground stump that is as woody and tough almost as that
of a tree. Its strong fronds are next to those of the ostrich-fern in
the woody vigor of their stipes. Surely these might have lasted. Yet
not one form of fern life was visible in this once thronged wood. Like
the ostrich ferns they had poured their own fern-seed on their heads and
whispered the correct incantation at the coming of the first chill wind.
I am inclined to think it all happened in a jiffy, when happen it did,
for I have been back and forth through that part of the wood all the
fall and I cannot recall the day on which they were first missing. It
seems as if I would have noticed their gradual crumbling and decay.
The same is true of the clumps of _Osmunda regalis_ that grew here and
there along the pond shore. Rightly named “regalis” they stood in royal
beauty four or five feet tall and leaning over the water’s edge admired
the bipinnate grace of their fronds, while the tallest stalks bore aloft
the clusters of spore cases that looked like long spikes of plumed
flowers. No wonder the plant which is common to England also drew the
notice of Wordsworth, who refers to it as--
“that tall fern,
So stately, of the queen Osmunda named.
Plant lovelier in its own retired abode
On Grassmere beach than naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook.”
Flowering fern it is rightly named, too, but it had flowered and gone,
and I found of all its regal beauty but a single stalk with brown
spore-cases held rigidly aloft among a tangle of brown leaves and bog
grass.
Then I looked for the sensitive fern. This with its slender, creeping
rootstock sending up single fronds is less woody than any of the others
and I began to suspect that it would have disappeared utterly. So the
sterile fronds had. There was no trace of them in spots that in summer
were a perfect tangle. But this was not true of the fertile stalks. Here
and there these, like the one of the royal fern, stood erect and bore
their close-lipped spore cases, seal-brown and stiff, high above dead
leaves and other decay of fragile annuals.
All this made a disheartening fern chase, and I turned to the steep side
of the hemlock-shaded northern hill, sure of one hardy variety that
would have no use for invisibility, however chill the north wind might
blow. No smile of direct sunlight ever touches this hill. It is set so
steep that only the mid-summer midday sun overtops its slant and this
the dense hemlock foliage shuts out. No woodland grasses grow in its
dense shadow and only here and there the partridge berry and the pyrola
creep down a little from the top of the ridge where some sunlight slips
in. Yet in its densest part the Christmas fern revels and throws up
fronds that seem to catch some of their dark beauty from the deep green
twilight of the place. In the spring these stand in varying degrees of
erectness, but autumn seems to bring a change in the cellular structure
of the lower part of the stipe and weaken it so that the fronds fall
flat upon the earth. They lose none of their firm texture or color,
however, and be the temperature ever so low or the snow ever so deep
they undergo no further change till the next spring fronds are well
under way. Sometimes even in mid-summer you may find the fronds of the
year before, somewhat fungi-encumbered and darkened with age, but still
green.
No other fern grows in the denser portions of this hemlock twilight,
though the Christmas fern clings close to it, and does not spread to the
more open glades on other portions of the hill. Another northern hill of
similar steepness but shaded by an old growth of pines through which
certain sunlight filters during most of the day has specimens of the
_Polystichum acrostichoides_ growing only in its most sheltered nooks
from which they do not seem to spread even to the brighter spots near by
on the same declivity. Hence I infer that the plant prefers the
twilight, and does not thrive in even occasional sunlight.
Just at the base of this second hill, however, where cool springs begin
to bubble forth in the mottled shadow, I caught a gleam of a lighter,
lovelier green that was like a dapple of sunlight on clumps of Christmas
ferns, and I came near passing it by for that. Then, because I had
never seen this fern growing in a dapple of sunlight, I went to it and
found that I had chanced upon a group of the spinulose wood fern. The
plumose fronds showed no more winter effects than did those of the
Christmas ferns. The keen frosts had not shrivelled them, nor was there
any hint of the brown that might come with the ripening of leaves or the
departure of sap.
Like the other ferns they had suffered a failing of tissues near the
base of the stipe, but pinnules, midribs and rachis were as softly,
radiantly green as they had been under the full warmth of the summer
sun. Owing to this failure of tissues in the stipe they lay flat to the
ground, but they were still beautiful, perhaps more so than they had
been when they stood more erect in summer, and were obscured and hidden
by the other green things of the wood. I know I tramped within a few
feet of them again and again last summer without noticing them, yet
to-day they caught my eye a long way off, and held it in admiration even
after a long and close inspection.
Farther down in the very swamp, laid flat along the sphagnum and
oftentimes frozen to it, were fronds of the crested shield-fern and the
patches of these tolled me far from my find and it was only on coming
back for another look that I discovered the prettiest thing about it.
That was, near by and half sheltered by tips of the elder fronds, young
plants of the same variety, just advancing from the prothallus stage and
having one or two miniature fronds like those of the parent plant but
not more than two or three inches long.
These looked so tiny as compared with the mature ferns, but were so
erect and confident, so fresh and green and very much alive though the
temperature about them night after night had been far below freezing and
their roots then stood in ice, that it was worth a journey, just to look
at them. How their tender tissues had stood the temperature of ten above
zero that had surrounded them a few nights before is more than I can
answer. The faintest touch of frost kills the fronds of the great
seemingly tough cinnamon and ostrich ferns. Yet these dainty little
plants of _Nephrodium spinulosum_ with their miniature fronds of tender
lacework had not even wilted or cowered before deep and continued cold
as had the stalks of their elders of the same species, but stood erect,
nonchalant and seemingly eagerly growing still.
We may say if we will that it is all a part of that magic of youth that
makes a million miracles each spring but that does not explain it. Why
should these be so strong and full of life when the fronds of the
hay-scented fern, for instance, have been shrivelled to dry and
crumbling brown fragments under the same conditions? I cannot answer
this either.
Last of all I thought of the polypodys that grow in the rock crevices
all down along the glen, and went to see how they fared. It has been a
hard year for these little fellows. There must have been weeks at a time
during the scorching days of the long summer’s drought that their roots,
clinging precariously in rock crevices and dependent for moisture wholly
on rain and dew, were dry to the tips. The very heat of the rock itself
under the blister of the sun would not only evaporate all moisture, but
would so remain in the rock all night as to prevent any dew from
condensing on it.
I had seen the polypodys at midday curled up on themselves seemingly
nothing but dried tissues that could never be again infused with the
breath of green life. Yet, let there come but the briefest of showers
and you would see them uncurl, lift their fronds to the breeze, and go
on as cheerily as their lower level neighbors the lady-ferns whose
pinnules flashed in the drip of the splashing stream and whose roots
bathed in the shallows.
The summer must have weakened them. Were they the sort to shrivel at the
touch of the freezing wind and vanish into the fern-seed magic of
invisibility? Not they. The slender crevice of black dirt in which their
roots grow was black adamant with frost, but the polypodys swayed in
the biting wind as jauntily as they had in the soft airs of summer and
were as green and unharmed by the winter thus far as the Christmas ferns
had been.
While I gazed at them, admiring their toughness and courage, my eye
caught a bit of greenery on the rock high above and I had found the
second unexpected fern of my winter day’s hunt, for there from a crevice
dripped the rounded, finely crenate, dark green pinnæ of _Asplenium
trichomanes_, the maidenhair spleenwort.
Many a day during the summer had I sat on that ledge, listening to the
prattle of the brook down the glen and watching the demoiselle flies
flit coquettishly up and down stream while the dragonflies with
masculine directness darted hither and thither. The polypodys must have
often dropped their fern-seed on my head, but the magic that they
invoked with it must have been of the sort that made not me, but the
little fern above invisible, for it remained for this winter day of a
green Christmas week to show me its fragile beauty still green and
undisturbed in the winter weather. No other evidence was needed, nor
could I have any so good, to prove that spring is indeed here before the
winter comes, and though the cold and snow may retard they cannot
prevent it from reaching the full beauty and climax of maturity.
THE BARE HILLS IN MIDWINTER
Toward morning the south rain, whose downpour was the climax of the
January thaw, ceased, and in the warm silence that followed Great Blue
Hill seemed like a gigantic puffball growing out of the moist twilight
into the dryer upper atmosphere of dawn. Standing on its rounded dome
you had a singular sense of being swung with it upward and eastward to
meet the light. At such times the whirling of the earth on its axis is
so very real that one wonders that the ancients did not discover it long
before they did. Surely their mountaineers must have known.
After a little the battlemented donjon of the observatory looms clear
and you begin to notice other details of the gray earth beneath your
feet. The south wind has brought and left with you for a brief space the
atmosphere of the Bermudas, and you need only the joyous hubbub of bird
songs to think it June instead of January. Instead there is a breathless
silence that is like resignation and a portent all in one. Breathing
this soft air in the golden glow of daybreak it seems as if there could
never be such things as zero temperature and northwest gales; but the
whole top of the hill keeps silence. It knows.
As the day grows brighter you can see the little scrub-oaks that make
the summit plateau their home crouch and settle themselves together for
the endurance test which is their winter lot. They have opened their
hearts to the south rain while it lasted, but they know what to expect
the moment it is gone. They studied the weather from Blue Hill summit
long before the observatory was thought of.
All trees love the hill, but few can endure its winter rigors. You can
see where the hickories and red cedars have swarmed up the steep from
all sides, and as you note how the scrub-oaks compact themselves you
will see also the cedars holding the rim of rock as did that thin red
line of Scottish Highlanders at Inkermann, all dwarfed and crippled with
the struggle till they seem far different trees from the debonair slim
and sprightly red cedars of the alluvial plain. You can fairly see them
clench their teeth and hang on.
Yet they love the rocks that they have gripped for some hundreds of
years, and nothing but death will part them. There are red cedars
growing out of the gray granite near the southern rim of Blue Hill that
I believe were there when Bartholomew Gosnold stepped ashore, the first
Englishman to set foot on the soil of Massachusetts. No such age belongs
to the hickories that have managed to get head and shoulders above the
rim of the plateau, yet they too have lost their slender straightness.
The cold and the summit winds have pressed them back upon themselves
till they are stubby, big-headed dwarfs.
Of how the other trees climb the hill we shall learn more if we begin at
the bottom, and we could have no better day in which to look them up
than this, for the south rain has swept the ground bare of all snow and
left us for a space this temperature of the Carolinas rather than that
of Labrador, which is our usual portion in January. Indeed, from the
sunny plain which stretches from the southern base of the rock declivity
you can see where even tender and jocund plants once began the climb
most jauntily.
Stalwart yellow gerardias, six feet tall some of them, grow in the rich
black mould that makes steps upward through the rock jumble. From August
till the frost caught them they scattered sunshine all along beneath the
hickories and chestnuts, maples and white oaks, tipping it out of golden
bowls to be shattered into the mists of goldenrod blooms that followed
after. These gerardias, though dry and dead, stand now, and will stand
despite gales and snow all winter long, boldly lifting brown seed pods
aloft, pods that grin in the teeth of bitter gales and send their chaffy
seeds floating up the slope to plant the sunshine banner a little
farther aloft for next year. Many centuries they have been at it, but
few of them have climbed far, yet they so love the hill that they cling
tenaciously to the ground they have gained and seem to grow more
vigorously there than on less rugged soil.
The roughest ledges of the hill jut boldly to the southward, showing
gray granite shoulders to the sun and making this side almost a sheer
rock precipice. Yet here the Highlander cedars have chosen to make their
climb in battalions, plaiding the gray surface with russet brown and
olive green, clinging tenaciously by toe-tips where it would seem as if
only air-plants might find nourishment. No other trees dare the bare
granite steep, though hickories flank the cedars wherever the slopes of
the ridge have crumbled a little and given a better foothold of black
soil.
Strange to say, the purple wood-grass that surely loves sandy plains
best has sent little scouting parties up with the hickories, and here
and there occupies tiny plateaus among the ledges well up toward the
ridge, often rimmed round with the purplish green of the mountain
cranberry. At the bottom of the gullies the maples began the climb, but
they did not last long. Red and white oaks have won farther up, but
stopped invariably before the summit of the gully was reached.
From the beautiful Eliot Memorial Bridge, near the eastern limits of the
summit plateau of Blue Hill, you catch a wonderful glimpse southeasterly
right down a narrow ravine to a wider valley, and thence down again to a
glow of white ice which is Houghton’s Pond. The bare trees no longer
hide one another and you see where they made a flank movement in force
for the summit, swarming over the wider upland valley, and narrowing to
a wild charge of great chestnuts up the gully. These chestnuts do not
seem to stand rooted. They sway this way and that and seem to hurrah and
wave flags in the wild excitement of a desperate and hopeful venture.
They are motionless, of course, but they have all the semblance of
splendid action that genius has given to sculpture, and they add romance
to the most picturesque spot on the range. Yet never a chestnut top is
lifted above the ridge which tops the gully. To it they came in all the
fine enthusiasm of a well-planned and concerted advance, but stopped so
suddenly that you see them in splendid action still, as if with one
foot in the air for the step that should take them above the ridge.
The north wind of the ages has stopped them right there where their tops
are just far enough above the level of the ridge edge to be safe from
it. You see them best by climbing down the little gully among evergreen
wood ferns which grow in the rich, moist soil among the rocks, the only
touches of green unless you happen upon some polypodys seemingly growing
out of the rock itself.
Right among the chestnuts the semblance changes again with the
harlequin-like magic of the woods. The big trees are no longer fixed in
the attitude of desperate charge upon a rampart, as you saw them from
above. Among them they seem to be tipsy bacchanals who have chosen the
little secluded glen for a place of revelry, and are reeling about it
like clumsy woodsmen in a big-footed dance. A chestnut tree standing by
itself on a plain is as stately and dignified as a village patriarch.
Grouped together in level, rich woodland, chestnuts are prim and almost
lady-like. Why these particular trees in the little glen at the east
side of Blue Hill summit should skip about in clumsy riot is more than I
can tell, but they certainly seem to do it, and I am not the only one
who has seen it and been shocked by it.
Right near by is a company of schoolgirl beeches, very straight and slim
and fair-skinned and pale. These have drawn together in a shivering
group and show every symptom of feminine dignity, very young and quite
outraged. They whisper and draw themselves up to the full tenuity of
their height and you can hear the dry snip of indignation in their
voices long before you reach them. No doubt they thought to have the
glen all to themselves for a proper picnic with prunes and pickles, and
here are these great fellows thus misbehaving! It is a shame and the
park police should put a stop to it. The beeches are so frosty in their
indignant withdrawal that the icy whispering of their dry leaves sounds
like fast falling sleet. Slip among them when you are next on the hill,
shut your eyes and listen. The day may be as sunny and warm as a winter
day can be, but you will think you hear the snow falling fast and will
be sorry you have not brought your fur muffler.
As for the chestnuts, I suspect they drank mountain dew at the illicit
still just below the gully. Surely no springs should have a license to
do business among the hilltops of this granite range. Yet they well up
freely among the lesser spurs that lie between Great Blue and Hancock,
and their moisture, drawn from cool depths to little ponds where the
southern sun shines in and the north and west winds are held back by
granite ridges, make rallying places for all kinds of wood and pasture
people that have yearned for mountain heights, but could not stand the
rigors of the summits. There are three of these little ponds on the
heights of the range almost within a stone’s throw of one another. It
may be that the seepage from surrounding ledges accounts for their flow
of water, but I am more inclined to think that cracks in the backbone of
the hills let the water flow up from subterranean depths. The margins of
two of them are the happy home of greenbrier which grows in tropical
luxuriance all about, so binding the bushes together with its spiny
twine that it is almost impossible to pass through them to the water.
Button-ball and high-bush blueberry grow with it and hold out their
branches for its smilax-like decoration, and the solemn and secretive
witch-hazel stalks meditatively about wherever the overhead foliage is
dense enough to make the mysterious twilight that it best loves. It
strolls up the gully beneath the shade of the chestnuts and you can but
fancy it smiling sardonically at their revelry and the prim indignation
of the schoolgirl beeches. Here and there swamp maples, strangely out of
place on hilltops, glow gray in the dusk as you stand below them, or
blush red in the clear sun as you look at their branch tips from the
cliffs. It is a picturesque little three-spurred peak lying here between
Great Blue and Hancock so sheltered and warm in the midday sun that it
is only by watching the sky that you know it is winter, though the ice
is white and strong on the little ponds.
I think you can get the best view of all of Great Blue Hill from the
summit of the lesser hill beyond the spurs and ponds and south of
Hancock, just overhanging Houghton’s Pond. There you see the forest-clad
slope sweep grandly up to form this broad upland valley, wrinkle a bit
with the folds where lie the three little ponds, then rise again most
majestically all along the steep side of the hill. At this time of year
it is one broad, majestic mass of the warm gray of bare tree trunks in
which rock ridges stand indistinct in purer color, while here and there
clustering twig masses purple it. You can see the black shadows in the
face of the cliff where stands the little glen in which the chestnuts
disport, and down near the highest of the three ponds is a beautiful
little splash of white all flushed with pink. This marks the location of
a group of young birches, the only ones I find on the heights of the
range.
Midday had passed and with it the genial warmth that the south wind had
brought us. Instead romping northern breezes had a tang in them and torn
clouds sailed swiftly into view over the summit of Great Blue, rushing
deep blue shadows across the warm grays of the landscape. The age-old
battle of sun and wind was going on on every summit of the range.
Climbing the southerly slope of Hancock it was hard to believe it
winter. You got either season on the summit plateau according to the
nook you chose, but standing on the rim of the precipice, which faces
north you had no doubts. From your feet to the foot of the hill in this
direction it was winter indeed. Yet here was the greenest spot in the
whole range. Scrambling perilously down the face of the cliff I touched
rich green vegetation with either hand and stood amid luxuriance at the
bottom. For here you are at the meeting place of ferns.
Little sunshine reaches the face of this cliff in the high noon of a
midsummer day. No direct ray touches it all winter long, yet in the
chill twilight the polypodys swarm all along the summit of the ridge and
drip and dance down and stretch out their hands to neighbor ferns that
climb cheerily to meet them out of the moist shadows below. These are
the evergreen wood ferns. In the rich black frozen earth of the lower
woodland they grow in profusion. On the rocky acclivity they hold each
coign of vantage and splash the plaid of gray rock and brown leaves
with their rich green. Where cliff meets rock jumble the two draw
together and fraternize, and the polypodys come farther off the cliff
than I have often seen them, and the wood ferns grow in slenderer
crevices of the bare rock than anywhere else that I know.