g fronds. This is known as the "heart of Osmund."
The fern, itself, with its tall, recurving leaves makes a beautiful
ornament for the shady lawn, and like the interrupted fern is easy to
cultivate. The spores of all the _osmundas_ are green, and need to
germinate quickly or they lose their vitality. Common in low and swampy
grounds in eastern North America and South America and Japan. May. Some
think it was this species which was coupled with the serpent in the old
rhyme,

"Break the first brake you see,
Kill the first snake you see,
And you will conquer every enemy."

[Illustration: Osmunda cinnamomea, var. _glandulosa_ (From Waters's
"Ferns," Henry Holt & Co.)]

Var. _frondosa_ has its fronds partly sterile below and irregularly fertile
towards the summit.

Var. _incisa_ has the inner pinnules of some of the pinnae more or less
cut-toothed.

Var. _glandulosa_ has glandular hairs on the pinnae, rachis and even the
stipes of the sterile frond. This is known only on the coastal plain from
Rhode Island to Maryland.

III

CURLY GRASS FAMILY

SCHIZAEACEAE

CURLY GRASS. _Schizaea pusilla_

Small, slender ferns with linear or thready leaves, the sterile, one to
two inches high and tortuous or "curled like corkscrews"; fertile fronds
longer, three to five inches, and bearing at the top about five pairs of
minute, fruited pinnae. Sporangia large, ovoid, sessile in a double row
along the single vein of the narrow divisions of the fertile leaves, and
provided with a complete apical ring. (_Schizaea_, from a Greek root meaning
to split, alluding to the cleft leaves of foreign species.)

[Illustration: Curly Grass. _Schizaea pusilla_]

The curly grass is so minute that it is difficult to distinguish it when
growing amid its companion plants, the grasses, mosses, sundews, club
mosses, etc. The sterile leaves are evergreen. Pine barrens of New Jersey,
Grand Lake, Nova Scotia, and in New Brunswick. Several new stations for the
curly grass have recently been discovered in the southwest counties of Nova
Scotia by the Gray Herbarium expedition, mostly in bogs and hollows of
sandy peat or sphagnum.

[Illustration: Sporangia of Curly Grass]

CLIMBING FERN. HARTFORD FERN

_Lygodium palmatum_

"And where upon the meadow's breast
The shadow of the thicket lies."
BRYANT.

Fronds slender, climbing or twining, three to five feet long. The lower
pinnae (frondlets) sterile, roundish, five to seven lob