Excerpt from A History of British Ferns The cultivation of Ferns is becoming a fashionable pursuit. It is no longer confined to the botanist and horticulturist; almost every one possessing good taste has made, more or less successfully, an attempt to rear this tribe of plants. Ferns constitute so beautiful a portion of the creation, whether they ornament our ruins with their light and graceful foliage, wave their bright tresses from our weatherbeaten rocks, or clothe with evergreen verdure our forests and our hedgerows, that it seems next to impossible to behold them without experiencing emotions of pleasure. Years before Ferns had become to me as friends with familiar faces, I could not pass them without turning to feast my eyes on what I thought their excessive lovehness. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.