Fern fever

Known as Pteridomania, the mid-19th-century craze for ferns had an impact that stretched far beyond the botanical

- Martyn Baguley

ONE OF the strangest events that occurs in the lives of the human species is the eruption of fads.

I chose the verb carefully because fads are a bit like volcanic eruptions - unpredictable and dramatic. In an article written in 2003, Dr Jaap van Ginneken of the University of Amsterdam says 'mainstream psychosocial explanations of mass behaviour fail to understand the sudden and unpredicted speed with which fads tend to come up and fade away'. In short, they defy the understanding of academics. They are a mystery that I find fascinating.

One botanical fad that many readers will have heard about was what came to be called 'tulipomania'. In 1634, for no known reason, Dutch society, poor and rich, became fanatical about exotic tulips. In a matter of months prices for tulip bulbs rocketed. At its peak in 1636 the price of one bulb was 10 times the yearly pay of a skilled artisan. Then in February 1637 prices suddenly collapsed. Nobody knows why. The tulip bubble had burst. People lost fortunes.

Tulipomania lasted for just three years but another plant fad endured for around eight decades: this time for ferns. It started in Britain, again inexplicably, in the 1830s and was at its height during the second half of the 19th century before petering out in the early 1900s. During that time the craze for collecting and keeping ferns crossed the Atlantic to North America and went as far south as Australia. In his book Glaucus (1855), Charles Kingsley gave it the name 'Pteridomania' (from pterido, the neo-Latin for fern) - 'fern fever'. Support for the craze was eloquently endorsed at the time by