Field Notes—

Christmas Ferns: Seasonal Color On The Forest Floor

By Curtiss Clark

Red and green are the colors of Christmas. There are lots of theories as to why.

Red, for example may symbolize the blood of Christ, who lies at the heart of the holiday in a manger. Red is, in nearly all contexts, a color of passion, and it is the color of the blood-drop bead-berries on the prickly holly bush.

It is also the color of Santa’s suit, though the world didn’t know that for sure until the Coca-Cola Company dressed Saint Nick in its own signature red color in a long-running series of Christmas promotions that started in 1931 and ran continuously at Christmastime for more than 30 years. Prior to that, Santa Claus had been depicted variously as everything from the original Fourth Century Saint Nicholas, a red-robed and relatively lanky bishop from a province in ancient Turkey, to Clement Clarke Moore’s diminutive “right jolly old elf” (no suit color given) in “A Visit From St Nicholas” (1822). Thanks to the people at Coke, however, everyone now thinks of Santa Claus as a human-sized portly man dressed in Coca-Cola red.

Green is an opposite kind of color. It sits next to blue across the color wheel from red among the serene colors of heaven and earth.

The green of Christmas comes to us from the ancient pagan festivals that predate the Christian holiday for which evergreens were brought inside to celebrate the triumph of life over the darkness of the winter solstice.

Any pagan or Christian who ventures out these days looking for some greens for garlands above the doorways or across the mantel will find the usual pines, spruces, hemlocks, and yews no farther away than the nearest evergreen border. But venture a little farther into the woods, and there, poking out of the snow are the Christmas ferns.

I am not very good at identifying ferns, which is why there’s a fern book in my small library of field guides. Ferns have been around for nearly 400 million years, far longer than flowering plants. Over the eons, they have feathered forest floors, organizing themselves into extensive families of woodsias, rues, spleenworts, and various other ferns of great finery and filigree with leaves once, twice, and thrice-cut in their graceful stretch from the stem.

I don’t need the book, however, to identify the Christmas fern. It is the only green fern left in the woods around my house after the hard frosts of fall. The Christmas fern’s fertile spore-laden smaller leaves at the tips of the fronds wither and die with the onset of cold weather. But the larger infertile leaves are wintergreen and retain their chlorophyll year-round. On sunny, mild winter days, the Christmas ferns convert enough sunlight into chemical energy to achieve a net photosynthetic gain when other plants are lying dormant, surviving on energy stored in roots and rhizomes like summer memories.

The Christmas fern got its name, no doubt, from its prominent place in Christmas decorations of days gone by. But some say the leaflets have the look of Christmas stockings hung with care waiting for St Nicholas — green waiting for red waiting for the return of light, life, and yet another Christmas morn.