Fern Seeds were long associated with invisibility, a power especially useful for those up to no good. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I Act II, Scene 1 (1596-7), Gladshill tries to reassure his accomplice by saying “we have the receipt of fern seed; we walk invisible” (Act II, Scene I), while in Ben Jonson’s New Inn or The Light Heart (1629) a servant, who has been discovered hiding, explains to his master that it was “because indeed I had no med’cine, Sir, to go invisible. No fern-side in my pocket” (Act I, Scene VI). To be in receipt of fern seeds was 19^th century slang for being invisible.

Collecting the seeds could be a dangerous occupation, fraught with disappointment. Richard Bovet wrote in Pandaemonium (1684) of “much discourse about the gathering of Fern-seed (which is looked upon as a Magical herb) on the night of Midsummer’s Eve, and I remember I was told of one that went to gather it, and the Spirits whistlit by his ears and sometimes struck his Hat or other parts of his Body. In fine: though he had gotten a quantity of it, and secured it in papers and a Box besides, when he came home he found it all empty. But probably this appointing of times and hours is the Devil’s institution”.

The performance of elaborate rituals, the chanting of spells, and carrying such artefacts as an earthenware dish, a pewter platter, a skull lined with moss and clay with the tress of a loved one’s hair attached, and a hazel rod with which to shake the seeds were thought to be enough to ward off the evil spirits guarding the seeds. However, failure to carry out the rituals correctly risked missing out on the seeds and incurring the displeasure of the spirits.

Some, though, believed that a more benign spirit, Oberon, guarded the seeds. Thomas Jackson, in his A treatise concerning the Original of Unbelief (1625), described his encounter with an “ignorant soule” who told of “what he saw and heard when he watch’t the falling of the Ferne-seed at an unseasonable and suspitious houre. Why (quoth he) doe you think that the devil hath ought to do with that good seed? No: it is in the keeping of the King of the Fayries and he, I know, will do me no harm”.

More rigorous scientific minds sought to solve the mystery of the fern’s propagation. The 16^th century German botanist, Hieronymus Bock, laid out white sheets underneath a stand of ferns and for four consecutive nights around Midsummer waited to see what happened. He was disappointed to find that the fern had not flowered and that his sheets were spotted with small black dots. Had he but realised it, he had solved the mystery.  

The black spots were spores which are released from the sori, the brownish grey spots found on the underside of the fronds. A fern can have as many as twenty million of these spores, some as small as particles of dust. It was not until 1848 that the Polish botanist, Michael Jerome Lesczczyc-Suminski, finally unlocked the mystery of the fern’s life cycle.

Once it has found the right balance of light, temperature, and moisture, a fern spore germinates, producing a rootless, green heart-shaped leaf, the prothallium, on the underside of which are the male and female sexual organs. These produce egg and sperm which, when fertilised, develop into an embryo containing roots, stems, and leaves. It is from this that the young fern emerges, bearing the characteristics of its grandparent rather than its parent, its reproductive process so lengthy that it skips a generation.

For the fern, there is no evolutionary need to rush. It is self-sufficient, free from reliance upon pollinators, and hardy enough to germinate in the most unpromising of terrains, even in the Arctic and Antarctica, factors that have contributed to its survival for over one hundred million years. In many ways its real life cycle is as magical and mysterious as the myths that surround it.