by By Boughton Cobb, Elizabeth Farnsworth, and Cheryl Lowe
Houghton Mifflin, 2005
Anyone familiar with the 1956 Boughton Cobb fern book in the Peterson field guide series will feel at home reading this new edition. The overall arrangement – text on the left, illustration on the right – is just like the old one, and most of the illustrations are the same, except they are better and brighter. The originals, by Laura Louise Foster, were rescanned and now are not as faint as before. Plus, the book is printed on shinier paper, which makes the drawings more vivid. A few new, full-page illustrations have been added, plus there are more of the little close-ups of sub-leaflets and the differently shaped spore cases and their covers, called “indusia.” These are the features that need to be examined closely if the fronds of the ferns you are trying to identify look too much alike.
As the 100 or so color photographs confirm, ferns are beautiful, and as a group, they have made up for their limited range in color by inventing a stunning variety of elegant shapes. Many of the photos are helpful additions to the illustrations in the identification process.
There is a key to the genera in the front of the book and a key to each of the species within a genus at the beginning of the appropriate section. Each genus gets an interesting overview before we proceed to the species level. The origin of many of the Latin names is given, which can often make remembering easier: the species name for ostrich fern, struthiopteris, is from the Greek struthos for ostrich and Latin pteris for fern. And you can add to this that the fronds of this large fern narrow abruptly at the tip, not unlike an ostrich’s feathers.
Not so easy to digest is that the inclusion of a fern in a particular family is no longer reliable. Fern families are in a state of flux, and, in addition, many Latin genus and species names have been changed.
The silvery glade fern used to be silvery spleenwort, which slid nicely off the tongue, and, in Latin, it most recently was Athyrium thelypteroides, a name you could feel proud to get your tongue around. Now, nothing is the same, and (for the time being) it is to be called Deparia acrostichoides.
The name-changers have really run roughshod over the clubmosses, with only one of the 11 clubmosses in the genus called Lycopodium in the earlier edition allowed to keep its old name. The authors predict that in the future, DNA analysis of ferns will result in another round of shuffling them from one genus or family to another. I hope that process takes something close to the 50 years that have elapsed since Boughton Cobb catalogued the ferns some 50 years ago. It would discourage many amateurs to have to replace Diphasiastrum complanatum, for instance, with yet another name soon after getting that exiled Lycopodium reliably filed in memory.
Elizabeth Farnsworth and Cheryl Lowe, two pteridologists from the New England Wild Flower Society, have greatly expanded the descriptions of the ferns. Now, for $20, you get 404 pages of text, over half again as many pages as the original $12.95 book, and lots – as opposed to zero – color. The book is nicely designed, detailed, comprehensive, and only a little bit too big and heavy to slip into a pocket.