Marianne North, Recollections of a Happy Life, 1894
One
day the captain started Agnes Wilberforce
and myself on two
horses with a groom
for Newcastle, where he had arranged that
Dr. S.
should meet us and show us
the famous Fern Walk. It was
a glorious
day. We rode up the steep
hills straight into the clouds, and found
rain
in the great village of barracks,
but we went on in spite of it. The
scarlet geraniums and zinnias of former
soldiers' gardens had seeded
themselves all
about, and above
them we came to patches of wild
alpinia, called by the English ginger and
cardamom, with lovely waxy
flowers smelling
[89] like their names. Great branches of
Oncidium
orchids were pushing their way
through the bushes, and creepers in
abundance, huge white cherokee roses, and
quantities of begonias. At
last we turned
into the forest at the top of the
hill, and rode through
the Fern Walk ;
it almost took away my breath with its
lovely fairy-like
beauty; the very mist
which always seemed to hang among the
trees
and plants there made it the more lovely and mysterious. There were
quantities
of treeferns, and every other sort of
fern, all growing piled
on one another;
trees with branches and stems quite covered
with them, and with wild bromeliads and
orchids, many of the bromeliads with
rosy centres and flowers coming out of them.
A close waxy pink ivy was running up
everything as well as the creeping fern,
and many
lycopodiums, mosses, and lichens.
It was like a scene in a pantomime,
too good to be real, the tree-fern fronds crossing and recrossing each
other
like network. One saw dozens at one
view, their slender stems
draped and hidden
by other ferns and creeping things. There
were tall
trees above, which seemed to have long fern-like leaves also hanging
from
them, when really it was only a large
creeping fern which had
found its way
over them up to the very tops. They
were most delicious
to look at, and, my
horse thought, to eat also, for he
risked my life
on a narrow ledge by
turning his head to crop the leaves from the
bank, when his hind -legs
slipped over the precipice. I said "Don't,"
and the Doctor and Agnes laughed, while the good horse picked his
legs up again
and went on munching in a more sensible
position. We
rode back by a lower fern walk, still lovelier because it was even damper.
p 96
I did one great study in the Fern Walk, sitting in my mackintosh cloak, and bringing it back soaking outside every day.
