Flora Danica Tab. MCCCXLVI, Lady Fern

Ferns are a plant with an ancient ancestry, older in existence than every species of flower and fruiting tree; they first covered the earth over 360,000,000 years ago, preexisting the dinosaurs and living 65 million years after their famous extinction.

Today, there are around 10,000 species of fern distributed across the earth. The piece shown here, as a part of the Flora Danica collection, is native to the northern temperate regions of scandinavia, and is known as the “Lady Fern,” or Athyrium filix-femina.

Ferns are easily identified by their intricate and lace-like fronds, that are depicted here lying widely spread and gracefully drooping in slight curls.

Flora Danica included every plant species native to Denmark, and was intended as a visual encyclopedia for the royal college and the royal family to use. After the first prints were released, the Copenhagen porcelain factory began to also use the collection as a decorative guide for their tableware. Even in the height of the Victorian era’s ‘pteridomania’ craze, when fern motifs were highly popular on everything from porcelain to textiles, Oeder would not sacrifice botanical accuracy for the artistic benefit of the Copenhagen porcelain factory’s work, and his is shown through his inclusion of the unaesthetically pleasing “sori,” the small brown and white speckles on the fronds, in this print.

These sori are small capsules that produce and house the spores that ferns reproduce through, hidden on the underside of each fern frond. Existing prior to the evolution of seeds and flowers, ferns such as this depend on a method of growth similar to fungi, where spores establish themselves separately from the parent plant and grow small root-like hairs, and exist in a state of half-dormancy until a spore of the opposite gender reaches it, and together they establish a fern, fully equipped with their combined parents’ genetic background.

Originating from an era so far gone that it is difficult to conceive, ferns are one of the most important types of non-flowering plants in existence today. Through Oeder’s precise visual records, Danish artists were able to have models for their works that contributed to pteridomania, and botanists were able to discover the curious way that ferns reproduce.