fern printing

Pteridomania
Fern mania
Fern madness
Fern fever
Fern craze

OED
pteridomania n.
Brit. /ˌtɛrᵻdə(ʊ)ˈmeɪnɪə/
now chieflyhist. an extravagant enthusiasm for ferns.
1855   C. Kingsley Glaucus (ed. 2) 4   Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’, and are collecting and buying ferns.
1970   New Scientist 7 May 296/1   Pteridomania had many social aspects yet it seems to have been almost forgotten outside botanical circles.
2003   Times (Nexis) 6 Jan. (Features section) 10   When the second and somewhat less fanatical wave of pteridomania began in the late 20th century, the principal objects of desire were exotic species.

† pteridophilist n. Obsolete rare. a fern enthusiast.
1866 Pall Mall Gaz. 12 Sept. 10 Pteridophilists being, after all, in plain English, nothing but lovers of ferns.

† pteridophilism n. Obsolete rare a love of ferns.
1866 Pall Mall Gaz. 12 Sept. 10 Our own pteridophilism being of a less pronounced and practical kind.

The OED has it that pteridomania is chiefly historical. Here in New Zealand, the term may be obsolete, but the concept isn’t. Fern mania drives our sports marketing, our international image, and the 2016 ‘flag debate’. Why is our image so tied up with ferns?

The Victorian craze of collecting ferns is a big part of it. The NZ fern identity is inextricable from our colonial history. Of course pteridomania started outside of New Zealand. It started with Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in 1829 and his Wardian case – a kind of terranium or hot house for ferns. His fern house kick started a collecting craze. Ferns in Scotland and Ireland were depleted as everyone in the middle classes went out in search of their own specimens.

When the British emigrated to New Zealand in vast numbers after the signing of the treaty and the establishment of The New Zealand Company, they came with a predisposition for ferns. The ferns were a connection to the home they left behind. For decades, Pākehā were sending home ‘fern cards’. Local newspapers were advertising these fern cards and advising quick postage for the cards to arrive back in Britain in time for Christmas.

Ferns in Britain were associated with fairies, magic and primeval aspects of nature. And in the Victorian ‘language of flowers,’ ferns symbolise fascination. The extraordinary wealth of fern varieties and the fern-appropriate climate here in Aotearoa was an intoxicating component for the colonial rewriting of place. Ferns were part of the colonial imagination that tapped into the pastoral and bucolic art and literature still popular in the 1800s and turned Aotearoa into a home of magical fabrication.

On our trip to Tongapōrutu, I retraced the steps of colonial pteridomania. I invoked another kind of imagining. Emily Cumming Harris and her family arrived in Taranaki with the New Zealand Company on the William Bryan in 1841. Emily was 4. She would go on to be a wonderful diarist and a botanical artist. She published New Zealand Ferns, a lithographic printing of a collection of her fern drawings. There are little snippets of her ferning ventures in her diaries “I have not been able to get the ferns for Miss Mayling yet” (1860) and her mother too when describing a walk “I did not gather any ferns as I could not well carry them (undated).

No doubt Emily picked the same ferns as I did in that same area of the country. What did Emily think of them? Did she see magic in them?

Fern cards in NZ Herald