Fantastic Fronds

Perched high on the side of a mountain, in the heart of Argyll, is one of the most unusual garden buildings in Scotland. It has high stone walls and a barrel-vaulted glass roof and it looks like a cross between an ancient chapel and a Bond villain’s lair.

Reaching it involves climbing up a steep and twisting path until you arrive at a wooden door set into an imposing gable wall and stepping from the sunshine into its dark interior is like entering a different world.

Inside the air is cool and moist and a twin staircase leads up either side of a dark porch to the first of two higher levels, each of them filled with green fronds, some at ground level, others stretching  outwards from the walls and the tallest of them filtering the light that reaches into the building from overhead, creating the sensation of being under the canopy of a forest.

This is the Benmore Fernery, which until a decade ago was a derelict ruin, but which, thanks to an ambitious restoration project, is now flourishing, just as it would have when it was first constructed in the early 1870s.

The fernery was built by James Duncan, a wealthy sugar refiner, who bought the Benmore estate in 1870 and set about transforming it with true Victorian vigour, extending the house, developing the walled garden and planting six million trees. He also developed a passion for ferns, which were amongst the most fashionable plants of the age, and the fernery was where he kept some of the most important ferns in his collection. But times change and when Benmore was gifted to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh by subsequent owners, the Younger family, in 1925, the fernery had been almost forgotten.

Despite efforts to maintain it, time and the elements played a part in reducing it to a ruin until in 1992 Historic Scotland designated it a Category B listed building, one of only a handful of its kind.  Following this, interest in the fernery grew and the Friends of the Benmore, along with the Younger (Benmore) Trust, began to formulate plans for its restoration.

A detailed survey was commissioned, followed by plans for rebuilding and finally, through support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Younger (Benmore) Trust, along with an RBGE Members’ Appeal, the funds were finally in place and work got underway.

Now visitors to Benmore who climb the path to the fernery are rewarded for their efforts by a building that has been brilliantly restored and which provides an astonishing glimpse into the fascinating world of ferns.

And ferns are indeed fascinating. They are the ancient oddities of the plant world, a living link to prehistoric times; hugely diverse and adapted in their various forms to wet woodland and sun-baked desert.

Argyll’s Atlantic oakwoods are home to many different kinds of ferns, but many non-natives also grow at Benmore, including Lophosoria quadripinnata from Chile as well as species from Tasmania and Japan.

The fernery itself is filled with plants from around the world, including tree ferns from New Zealand, Central America and Papua New Guinea.

A Thyrsopteris elegans is from the Juan Fernandez Islands - lonely home for a time of Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor whose fate inspired the tale of Robinson Crusoe  - and the stands of Todea barbara were grown from spores taken from a massive, 1,000 year old specimen that grows in Scotland’s other remarkable fernery, which can be found at Ascog Hall on Bute.

Some ferns cling to the exposed cliff face that makes up one wall of this remarkable building, while others grow in near-darkness around the rim of a damp grotto. And the fernery is also home to the delicate and beautiful filmy ferns - so called because their fronds are just one cell thick.

Outside, the slopes of Benmore are covered in ferns, including natives such as the hardy fern (Blechnum spicant) and the buckler fern (Dryopteris aemula). Mild winters, cool summers and rainfall that can reach 3,000 mm in the wettest of years, provides the perfect conditions for these and many other ferns to flourish.

FANTASTICAL FERNS
Ferns are not like other plants. They produce no flowers, instead they reproduce through the brown spores that appear on the backs of their pinnate (the fern equivalent of a leaf.) And this method of survival has proved to be highly successful. Fossils of ferns from western Canada have been dated at 75 million years old, when they would have been food for dinosaurs. However there is some evidence that fern are in fact much older. Fossils discovered in Antarctica have suggested that ferns may in fact have been flourishing 200 million years ago.

FERN FEVER
Pteridomania, or fern fever, began in the mid 1800’s as interest in the natural world began to grow. The arrival of the railways allowed city-dwellers to travel to the countryside and fern hunting trips became a popular pastime. What made ferns so fascinating was not just their diversity but that their life cycle had been so recently identified. Until it was discovered that ferns could be propagated by the spores on the underside of the fronds, mystery and folklore had surrounded the plants.

Now a new generation of both amateur and professional naturalists began to collect and classify ferns and the ‘fern allies’, those plant groups such as horsetails, to which they are closely related and as fern fever grew all kinds of paraphernalia including fine china, garden urns and Mauchline Ware - wooden souveniers made in factories around the Ayrshire town - were produced with fern decorations.

Some ferns were pushed to the edge of extinction by over-zealous collectors but today, as habitat loss and climate change threaten the future of some ferns, the RBGE is working on a number of research projects that will help to secure the continued existence of some of the most imperilled of the species.

The giant Redwood avenue

BENMORE
Benmore is the RBGE’s mountainside garden. It covers 50 hectares of a south-facing hillside above the Eachaig Valley, seven miles north of Dunoon and it is home to trees and shrubs from countries including Chile, Japan and Bhutan. One of its most significant features is the avenue of giant redwood trees that lead from the entrance into the garden from where a series of steep paths take visitors high into the canopy from where there are magnificent views across the woodlands and towards the Clyde.

Benmore is an important habitat for ferns, mosses, fungi and lichens, thanks to its mild, damp climate, which produces lush and rapid growth.

Garden Notebook
Benmore Botanic Garden
Dunoon, Argyll PA23 8QU
Tel: 01369 706261

www.rbge.org.uk