Scotland and the Fern Craze

established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The main specialist source is the botanist Christopher Page's Ferns (Collins New Naturalist, 1988), which has a chapter on the Victorian craze and the early science of ferns. Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica (1996) gives a second view of the craze's effects. The woodsia history comes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, which runs the recovery work, and the Killarney fern history from the same garden's account of its herbarium specimen. Kibble Palace details come from Historic Environment Scotland's listing of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and from Glasgow City Council.

Several dates disagree between sources. Page gives 1792 for Lindsay's paper, but the printed volume is dated 1794. Page dates the Kibble Palace to 1872, while Glasgow City Council gives 1873 for its move to the gardens. Page puts the start of the craze in the 1830s, Forestry and Land Scotland in the late 1840s and Wikipedia in the 1850s. Mabey doubted that collecting made any fern even locally extinct, while the Edinburgh garden describes the Moffat woodsia as virtually wiped out. These conflicts are set out where they arise.

Before the craze: ferns and clubmosses in Scottish dyeing

established Long before ferns were fashionable, Scots used their relatives. Page describes excavated material from medieval Perth, from floors and middens around 12th-century workshops, that held substantial shoot fragments of alpine clubmoss (Diphasiastrum alpinum) and stag's-horn clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum). They lay with heather, weld, birch bark, tormentil seeds and bracken, all possible dye plants. Page, citing the archaeobotanist M. A. Robinson, says the quantities point almost certainly to waste from dyeing.

established Clubmosses are not ferns, but they belong with them in the old group of spore-bearing plants. Page explains that they seem to have served as a substitute for alum, the usual mordant that fixes a dye to wool, probably because they take up aluminium. He notes that Lightfoot's Flora Scotica recorded this Scottish use in 1777. Modern trials by the Perth dyer Susan Grierson found the colours softer than with alum but more resistant to fading.

traditional Two of these plants are clan badges. Page, citing John Cameron's Gaelic Names of Plants (1883), gives stag's-horn clubmoss as the badge of Clan Munro and fir clubmoss (Huperzia selago) as that of Clan Macrae. The lists are 19th-century. How far back the badges themselves go is not documented.

John Lindsay and the fern "seed"

established Ferns have no flowers or visible seeds, and for centuries their reproduction was a matter of superstition. Page notes a recorded experiment of 1699 in which dust from hart's-tongue fronds, scattered on damp soil, produced young plants the next year. He credits the first clear answer to John Lindsay, a former student of John Hope, Professor of Medicine and Botany at Edinburgh and keeper of the Royal Garden there. Lindsay became a surgeon and went to Jamaica. There he noticed young ferns springing up in great numbers wherever earth had been dug and left shaded after the rains.

established Lindsay's own words, from his published account, describe young ferns appearing "after the rains in marle and gravel pits, and on the shaded banks of rivers which had been broken down by the floods". With a microscope he watched the fern dust germinate and form small, two-lobed, liverwort-like scales. From each grew a first small leaf, then larger ones. He sent his notes to Hope in Edinburgh, who planned to put them before the Royal Society of Edinburgh but died before he could do so.

established In a letter dated 29 March 1789 Sir Joseph Banks, the leading patron of botany in London, asked Lindsay for living Jamaican ferns. Lindsay doubted whole plants would survive the voyage and offered spores instead. Banks replied that if Lindsay could show ferns could be raised in England from such seed, he would have the credit of a valuable discovery. Lindsay's notes became a paper, communicated by Banks, in the Transactions of the Linnean Society of London. The fern botanist Robbin Moran adds that the fern genus Lindsaea was later named in his honour.

shared The date is not settled in the sources. Page says the paper was published in the Transactions "for 1792". The Biodiversity Heritage Library copy is volume 2, pages 93–100, dated 1794, and Page's own bibliography also cites it as 1794. The safest statement is that it was written by the early 1790s and printed in 1794.

established Lindsay did not work out the whole life cycle. He showed that the spores are the true fern seed and that they grow first into a small green plate, the prothallus, from which the young fern rises. The sexual stage on the prothallus was found half a century later. Carl Nägeli described its male organs in 1844, and in 1848 Michael Leszczyc-Sumiński showed sperm swimming to the egg. Lindsay's practical point mattered most to gardeners: ferns could be raised from spores by the hundred.

The glass case

established The second advance came from London. The Wardian case is named after Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, a doctor who kept moth cocoons in sealed glass bottles and found that in one a fern and a grass had sprouted and kept growing. He tested glazed cases on a voyage to Sydney in 1833 and published On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases in 1842. Wikipedia dates the original observation to about 1829.

established Page describes the case as an ornate miniature greenhouse on legs. It let ferns live in drawing rooms in the middle of London's coal smoke, which had defeated earlier attempts. From such cases it was a short step to the fern-filled conservatory. The cases had a wider use too: in the 1840s the plant collector Robert Fortune used them to move tea plants from China to India.

Pteridomania gets its name

established The word comes from Charles Kingsley's Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore, first published in May 1855. Addressing his reader, Kingsley says: "Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing 'Pteridomania,' and are collecting and buying ferns". The book grew out of an article Kingsley wrote for the North British Review in November 1854. He was teasing, but he also thought the hobby made people more active and cheerful.

shared When the craze began is a matter of definition. Page dates its first grip on the public to about the 1830s. Forestry and Land Scotland says it began in the late 1840s. Wikipedia gives its main period as the 1850s to the 1890s. Page also says the craze was "aptly dubbed" pteridomania by the historian David Allen in 1969; the word itself is Kingsley's, and Allen revived it.

established The craze was fed by print. Collectors carried identification books such as Thomas Moore's The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland. Page describes how, from about 1850, growers selected odd wild forms of common ferns and raised them from spores. Lady-ferns, male-ferns and shield-ferns gave hundreds of named varieties, forked, frilled, crisped or finely cut, many listed in nurserymen's catalogues. Page, a fern specialist, called many of them sheer monstrosities and a few quite beautiful.

Railways, collectors and the oblong woodsia

established Page explains why some ferns suffered and others did not. Hardy British ferns were free and needed no heating, so collectors went after them, and the rarer the better. The railways and their branch lines brought fern-rich hills within reach. Behind the amateurs came commercial collectors, sending ferns to city nurseries "sometimes by the cartload", in Page's phrase. Slow-growing rarities could not stand it. Page says the alpine woodsias and the Killarney fern suffered "sad and wanton devastation of their well-known wild populations, from which they have never recovered".

established The oblong woodsia is a small, tufted fern of cliff crevices, with fronds a few centimetres long. It is a plant of Iceland, Scandinavia and the Alps that reaches its oceanic edge in Britain. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh records that William Stevens found it in the Moffat Hills in July 1848, the year the Caledonian Railway was completed. Plants were found in the Devil's Beef Tub in 1850 and then at Loch Skene, Hart Fell and the head of the Carrifran Burn. The Moffat Hills turned out to be the species' British headquarters.

established The collecting was fast. The Edinburgh garden says the Devil's Beef Tub was collected out within three or four years of the discovery. An excursion led by Balfour in 1856 took the fern in considerable quantity. In 1857 a party under Sadler found five small tufts, took four and left one as an "egg in the nest". By 1891 only a single plant was known in the hills around Moffat. The garden says botanists collecting specimens for science added to the pressure, not only gardeners and dealers.

shared Not every writer agrees on the scale of harm. Mabey wrote in Flora Britannica that despite the plunder "it is doubtful if any species was made even locally extinct". The Moffat woodsia record is hard to square with that, and Page, citing studies by Rickard and Mitchell, calls its history one of extermination by botanical collection. Mabey's general point holds for commoner ferns such as royal fern, which were thinned rather than lost.

shared Page adds a suggestion of his own. He suspected that oblong woodsia's original home in northern Britain was on crags and screes within the old pinewoods, rather than only on high mountain cliffs. If so, the collectors finished a retreat that loss of forest had begun. This is his interpretation and has not been tested by fossil evidence.

The Killarney fern on Arran

established The Killarney fern is a filmy fern, with thin, translucent fronds, that grows in dripping, shaded ravines and caves. It was famous in Ireland, where Page says collectors devastated its wild populations. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh records that Robert Douglas, known as the "walking postman" of Arran, found it on the island in 1863, the first record for Scotland. He was advised to keep the site secret, but showed it to George Coombe of Glasgow, who stripped it almost bare.

established The fern has a hidden second life. Like all ferns it has two generations, and in this species both are long-lived. The leafy sporophyte needs damp, shaded sites, usually below 50 m. The gametophyte, small and easily overlooked, lives deep in crevices in very low light and is far more widespread. Wikipedia notes that the fern was thought extinct in Scotland after the collectors, and was later found on Skye in gametophyte form. The Edinburgh garden calls these gametophytes a living spore-bank and says reintroduction has been judged inappropriate for the species.

A Scottish discovery in a sea cave

established Not every story of the period is about loss. Wikipedia's account of the craze records that Dickie's bladder-fern was found in 1838 growing on base-rich rock in a sea cave on the Kincardineshire coast. Finds like this, of rare forms in remote places, were exactly what collectors went looking for.

The Kibble Palace

established Scotland's grandest monument to the age of glass is the Kibble Palace in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. Historic Environment Scotland's listing records that it began in the 1860s as a conservatory at Coulport House on Loch Long, the home of John Kibble. James Boucher and James Cousland were the architects, and it is a circular house about 150 feet across, joined by a corridor to a small entrance dome. Glasgow City Council says Kibble brought the glasshouse to Glasgow in 1873.

shared Page gives 1872 for the Kibble Palace in his list of surviving Victorian winter gardens. Most sources give 1873 for its re-erection at the gardens, and that date is preferred here.

established The building was not a fernery at first. Historic Environment Scotland records concerts there between 1873 and 1881, with the stage set over the pond under the main dome. After 1881 it was run wholly as a winter garden. It notes the tree ferns under the central dome, "some of which were planted in 1881". Glasgow City Council describes a large collection of southern-hemisphere tree ferns, with an Australian soft tree fern on an island in the entrance pond.

established Page photographed the interior and called it a classic Victorian fernery, with most of its ferns dating from 19th-century plantings. The structure itself has needed rescue. Wikishire reports that a restoration costing about £7 million began in 2004 to deal with corroded ironwork, that the palace was dismantled and repaired in Yorkshire, and that it reopened in November 2006.

established The Kibble Palace sits in a wider tradition. Page lists the great surviving glasshouses of the era, including the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (1858) and Glasgow's People's Palace (1880), and notes that the climax of iron-and-glass building was Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace of 1851.

Ferns as ornament

established The fern became a pattern as well as a plant. Page notes that unfurling fronds and croziers appeared in the cast-iron work of Victorian glasshouses and conservatories and in cast-iron garden furniture. Wikipedia adds that fern designs appeared on pottery by firms including Wedgwood, Minton and Royal Worcester, and on glass, metal, textiles and printed paper.

established Scotland had its own fern souvenir. The Ayrshire museum partnership Future Museum records that fern ware, a variant of the wooden Mauchline ware boxes, seems to have been first made about 1870. W. & A. Smith of Mauchline were the first and largest makers. On almost all pieces real ferns were laid on the wood as a stencil, and the surface was then coloured and varnished, leaving a pale fern silhouette. Other makers included the Caledonian Box Works of Lanark.

shared Page goes further and wonders whether the spiral crozier lies behind spiral motifs in many cultures, from Viking carving to the bishop's crozier. He offers this as a suggestion, and many of these shapes probably arose independently.

After the craze

established Page says the popular craze declined towards the close of the 19th century. A small body of expert growers outlasted it and founded the British Pteridological Society in 1892, which still exists. Only a fraction of the Victorian varieties survive in cultivation. Page also stresses that the period produced real science, from James Bolton's Filices Britannicae (1785–1789), which he calls the first book on the ferns of any country, to the field botanists who laid the foundations of modern fern study.

Bringing the woodsia back

established The oblong woodsia became a protected species in the UK in 1975. Wikipedia reports fewer than 90 wild clumps left in the UK. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh says the Wasdale Screes in Cumbria is the only British site where the fern is doing well and increasing.

established Putting it back has been slow. In 2003 Phil Lusby, Adrian Dyer and Stuart Lindsay of the Edinburgh garden described a translocation experiment to former sites in England and Scotland. They warned that high losses of transplants were to be expected and that recovery might need several phases. The garden's horticulturists have since mastered raising the fern from spores and have crossed plants from different sites to widen the genetic base.

established In February 2024 a team from the garden, the National Trust for Scotland and the Borders Forest Trust assessed the Devil's Beef Tub for suitable habitat. The garden planned trial plantings there and at Kilchoan and Glencoe, including wetter western sites. In February 2026 Forestry and Land Scotland announced that its staff and the garden's had planted 250 oblong woodsias on a scree slope at about 650 m in Glen Affric. The garden had chosen nine planting sites across Scotland for their scree, low competition and range of humidity, altitude, aspect and rock. Forestry and Land Scotland notes the fern is still threatened by fragmented habitat and climate change.

shared It is too early to say whether the plantings will work. The garden's own horticulturist said there is no certainty about the ideal conditions for the species. Success would mean plants that set spores and spread on their own, which takes many years for so slow a fern.

• The word "pteridomania" first appeared in print in Charles Kingsley's Glaucus in 1855, as a joke about daughters buying ferns.
• John Lindsay offered Sir Joseph Banks fern spores instead of living plants because he doubted whole ferns would survive the voyage from Jamaica.
• The fern genus Lindsaea is named after John Lindsay.
• The Wardian case began with a fern and a grass sprouting by chance in a sealed bottle.
• In 1857 a party of collectors found five tufts of oblong woodsia near Moffat, took four and left one.
• The Killarney fern can survive for years in its gametophyte stage in a dark crevice, with no fronds at all.
• The Kibble Palace was a concert hall before it was a winter garden.
• Mauchline fern ware was made by laying real fern fronds on wood as stencils.
• Clubmoss, a fern relative, was used as a mordant to fix dyes in Scotland, and its remains have been found in medieval Perth.
• Stag's-horn clubmoss is listed as the badge of Clan Munro, and fir clubmoss as the badge of Clan Macrae.

• Disputed: the date of Lindsay's paper. Christopher Page gives 1792, but the volume of the Transactions of the Linnean Society that prints it is dated 1794.
• Myth: John Lindsay discovered the full fern life cycle. He showed that spores grow into a small prothallus and then a young fern. The sexual stage was found in the 1840s by Nägeli and Leszczyc-Sumiński.
• Myth: the word "pteridomania" was coined by a modern historian. Charles Kingsley used it in Glaucus in 1855. David Allen's 1969 book revived it.
• Disputed: when the craze began. Page dates its start to the 1830s, Forestry and Land Scotland to the late 1840s and Wikipedia's main period to the 1850s. The difference is one of definition: the Wardian case and spore-raising came first, the mass collecting later.
• Disputed: whether collectors made ferns extinct. Richard Mabey doubted that any fern was made even locally extinct. The oblong woodsia in the Moffat Hills was reduced to a single known plant by 1891, and the Killarney fern's Arran site was stripped.
• Disputed: the Kibble Palace's date. Page gives 1872. Glasgow City Council and other sources give 1873 for its re-erection at the Botanic Gardens. It was first built in the 1860s at Coulport.
• Myth: the Killarney fern is extinct in Scotland. It was thought lost after the Arran site was stripped, but has since been found on Skye in its gametophyte form.
• Myth: the Kibble Palace was built as a fernery. It was first a private conservatory at Coulport and then a concert and exhibition hall in Glasgow until 1881. Its tree fern collection followed.
• Disputed: the age of the clan plant badges. Stag's-horn clubmoss for Munro and fir clubmoss for Macrae are recorded in 19th-century lists. Their earlier history is not documented.