#fern fever

"Fern-Fever" Pteridomania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pteridomania or Fern-Fever was a craze for ferns. Victorian decorative arts presented the fern motif in pottery, glass, metal, textiles, wood, printed paper, and sculpture, with ferns "appearing on everything from christening presents to gravestones and memorials."

The interest in ferns had really begun in the late 1830s when the British countryside attracted increasing numbers of amateur and professional botanists.

For some a fashionable hobby and for others a more serious scientific pursuit, fern collecting became commercialized with the sale of merchandise for fern collectors. Equipped with The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland or one of the many other books sold for fern identification, collectors sought out ferns from dealers and in their native habitats across the British Isles and beyond.

I like to think that all of these girls picked up botany b/c ferns looked cool and then all the boys picked up botany in order to impress the girls.