The term sailing is often abused. Examples of this are the non -related asparagus dangers (a flowering plant) and sweet ferns (a flourishing bush of the Comptonia gender). Even a group of animals called hydrozanish, distant to jellyfish and coral, is called air fern. Their skeletons are dried, painted green and sold as a plant that lives in the air.
Ferns are old plants, with fossils that date from the middle -devoon -era, around 390 million years ago -one hundred million years before the rise of flowering plants. The real Ferns Polypodiales that make up 80% of today’s ferns arose about 180 million years ago.
FIGARS FIGHES
The word sailing can come from the Anglo-Saxon contraction fepern or German Farn, both derived from the Sanskrit parna, which means “spring” or “wing”. “Some authors suggest that it comes from Farr (an OS), from its use as a cattle as cattle. These words eventually trace back to Proto-Germanic” Farną “, which is also related to the Latin” fērnum “and ancient Greek” Peron “or” pteron “, all refer to fern or ferny plants.
Fern -desk is reduced to the green algae that have been moved from water to land, similar to mosses. In contrast to mosses, however, ferns developed vascular tissue to transport water and nutrients, giving them more adaptability. Ferns consist mainly of a leaf stem, where the real stems are underground rhizomes. They are the intermediate between mosses and flowering plants.
Forty meter high tree ferns with five meters of leaves existed on earth before animals evolved. Nowadays, a tree fern reaches a spectacular two -meter high on the island of Norfolk in the Pacific.
Farts are vascular plants that have access to water and produce nutrients from the ground and produce traces. They are found in forest shadow, cracks in rocks in deserts, floating in water, in sour swamps or tamps of fifty feet of tree trunks. The flaky tree ferns of the Cyathea species can reach up to twenty meters (sixty-six foot).
It is estimated that the North American and European Stephanian coal can consist of a maximum of 75% old tree fern. Many ferns associate with mycorrhizal fungi and can grow in a wide range of pH, from intensely acidic soils to those found on limestone.
In addition to vascular tissue with which ferns can draw up water and nutrients, they have a different unique feature: thanks to horizontal gene transfer of Hornwols (to be treated in my book about Moss Medicine), they have a special red light -sensitive protein called Neochrome. Most plants can only detect blue light, but because of their shaded environment, ferns can use the “remaining” lower energy red light for photosynthesis. This was possible due to germinating traces of horns and ferns that pick up DNA, which makes the jump from the Bryofyt to modern ferns facilitate (Li et al. 2014).
Ferns do not produce pollen and are therefore not dependent on insects, birds or bats for reproduction. The life cycle of ferns is fascinating. When a spore in the right -hand mixture of temperature, light and moisture lands, it starts to germinate and forms a small green, heart -shaped leaf that doesn’t look like a sail. This is called a prizehallium and contains the sex organs of both male and female at the bottom. An egg is fertilized by sperm (which has a whoring -like flagellum) and grows in an embryo with carrots, stems and leaves. It takes three generations for a sail to make another sail. Note that flowering plants have sperm missing flagella, making ferns more like people in this respect.
Associations associate with mycorrhizal fungi, the sharing of carbon and sugars in exchange for the transport of nutrients to their descendants (gametophytes) grow underground.
Grape fern (Botrychium sp.) And Adder tongue (Ophioglossum) produce gametophytes that develop underground without chlorophyll and depend on the exchange of nutrients from fungal networks. Traces released by adult ferns in gametophytes that live safely underground prevent it from drying out and then producing photosynthetic leaves after rising from the ground.
Adult ferns feed the ‘children’ of neighboring ferns through fungal networks, which suggests that cooperative breeding (Beerling 2019).
Due to sporulation, it is often assumed that the sex life of fern is simple. But consider this. The mobile and independent sex cell of a fern is attracted by malic acid and makes it when it “scents”. Only 0.00000008 of a milligram is sufficient, a figure that would hardly be suppressed even the most advanced scientific equipment to identify. (Rogers 2014a)
There is another difference between ferns and flowering plants. The latter pushes out of the ground, where the magazine first develops its point and follow parts of the stem as the leaf grows. However, the leaves develop in the opposite direction. Instead of growing from bottom to top, it becomes down or from the inside, because the part that provides tissue is in the middle of the curled leaves. If you look carefully while it is unbound, it seems to be pushed on the earth from above (Grohmann 1989).
As a student of anthroposophy, Grohmann noticed how Rudolf Steiner fern compared to the first phase of a child’s development when they first say ‘I’. The leaves is the image of the nature of the ‘I’ that is felt by children.
I am a big fan of Steiner and his unique contributions to agriculture, education and medicine. However, his statement suggests that he believed that ferns are less developed or immature. In my opinion, Ferns developed their own evolutionary path and have been so successful that they continued with it. Why repair something that is not broken?
Historical popularity of ferns
In the 1840s, Pteridomania, or the Victorian sailing, was popular. The name Pteridomania is derived from the Greek Pterido, which means sailing. The British botanical magazine The Phytologist (1841) published new discovered ferns and the race had started.
John Smith (1868) documented 560 fern species in his catalog of the ferns and their allies cultivated in the Royal Gardens of Kew.
Charles Kingsley, in his book Glaucus; Or, the miracles of the coast, came up with the term pteridomania. The craze led people, especially women, to collect unusual ferns, to record their observations and to push them into their herbariums (or fernaria).
During this time in the United Kingdom, images of ferns were found on wallpaper, clothing, iron works, printed paper, textiles, pottery, glass, metal, wood, ceramic sculptures, tombstones and memorials. The obsession decreased in the 1890s.
Kingsley (1890) wrote: “Because the ‘Lady-Ferns’ and ‘Venus Hair’ appeared; and that you could not help yourself to look occasionally at the aforementioned ‘Venus’s hair’ and it agreed that the real beauties of nature were somewhat superior to the crazy woolen caricatures they had replaced.” After all, they were the Victorian era of suppressed sexuality and female foresis were not openly discussed.
Early Terraria, known as Wardian Affairs, were very popular at the time and looked like miniature greenhouses for indoor farming. Dr. Nathaniel Ward collected and observed moth cocons in closed glass bottles and noted that a male fern lived in one bottle for more than four years until the seal broke and made toxic air pollution possible. He continued to experiment and, in 1842, published about the growth of plants in close glasses.
His “discovery” led to the transplantation of living plants in British households and on long sea lengths. This made the transport of tea plants from China to India and the movement of rubber trees from Brazil to plantations in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) possible.
This historical practice of cultivating plants in controlled environments inspired my own interest, and I cultivated a moss/fern terrarium for a number of years when I was in the twenties.
