Gardening With Ferns, by Martin Richard

I must admit that I have not done or seen very much gardening that was centered on ferns, but this book did a good job of showing that it was possible to have an entire garden that was centered on ferns.  That is something that is an interesting concept to me, and the book does a good job at presenting to someone interested in gardening a solid reason of why someone should be interested in ferns.  There are some compelling reasons why one would wish to make ferns the center of a garden, and one of them is the way that ferns are easy to manage for those who are gardening in humid areas and want plants that are able to cope with it.  And though one might think that ferns are going to be rather monochromatic and dull green, there are definitely a wide variety of ferns that can be used in different gardens that are able to handle poor soil and rainy climates.  And it is really the ferns that make this book well worth reading, as there are some quirks about this book that make it less than ideal for readers in North America.

Overall this book is a relatively short one at just over 120 pages and it is divided into five sections.  The first section answers the question as to why one would want to grow ferns in one’s garden and why one would spend a whole book writing about them, which is a short introduction.  After that the author has some insight about how to care for ferns and in particular how to recognize the different climate requirements and tolerances of ferns, especially with regards to precipitation.  The bulk of the book is spent on discussing the A-Z of ferns, organized alphabetically by genus and then species name, with discussions of where the ferns come from, how big they grow, some aspects of their appearance, as well as how common they are.  After this there is a section of the book that discusses various projects where one can use ferns as the basis of one’s gardening.  This section includes suggestions for riverside ferns, seasonal borders, and even an exotic fern forest.  After that there is a series of appendices that include climate maps for Europe and the United States for hardiness, fern names and descriptions, a glossary of terms, the fern lifecycle, and fern societies around the world as well as national collections of ferns and where to see and buy ferns and suggestions for future reading.  The book then ends with an index.

Although there are definitely some positive aspects of this book, there are some negative aspects as well that are less than desirable about the book.  Chief among them is the approach of the author, who comes from Central England and who has spent a good deal of time in other British commonwealth areas like Australia and New Zealand and who definitely skews the detail of where it most appropriate to grow which ferns.  For example, while the author will specify down to the specific shire in England that is best for a particular fern (where applicable), she will make broad claims about plants being easy to grow in North America, as if it was an area the size of Warwickshire instead of being far larger and with far more climate zones and in need of far greater granularity than the author can provide.  If you happen to be a British fern collector, this book will be of great help, but if you happen to live in the United States or Canada it is less useful because the author’s bias and lack of information about the United States makes this book less useful than it would have been otherwise.