This section is from the book "The Wild Garden", by W. Robinson. Also available from Amazon: William Robinson: The Wild Gardener.
No plants may be naturalised more successfully and with a more charming effect than ferns. The royal ferns, of which the bold foliage is reflected in the marsh waters of Northern America, will do well in the many places where our own royal fern thrives. The graceful maidenhair fern of the rich woods of the Eastern States and the Canadas will thrive perfectly in any cool, shady, narrow lane, or dyke, or in a shady wood. The small ferns that find a home on arid alpine cliffs may be established on old walls and ruins. Cheilanthes odora, which grows so freely on the sunny sides of walls in Southern France, would be well worth trying in similar positions in the south of England, the spores to be sown in mossy chinks of the walls. The climbing fern Lygodium palmatum, which goes as far north as cold Massachusetts, would twine its graceful stems up the undershrubs in an English wood too. In fact, there is no fern of the numbers that inhabit the northern regions of Europe, Asia, and America, that may not be tried with confidence in various positions, preferring for the greater number such positions as we know our native kinds to thrive best in. One could form a rich and stately type of wood-haunting fern vegetation without employing one of our native kinds at all, though, of course, generally the best way will be to associate all so far as their habits and sizes will permit. Treat them boldly ; put strong kinds out in glades ; imagine colonies of Daffodils among the Oak and Beech Ferns, fringed by early Aconite, in the spots overshadowed by the branches of deciduous trees. Then, again, many of these Ferns, the more delicate of them, could be used as the most graceful of carpets for bold beds or groups of flowering plants. They would form part, and a very important part, of what we have written of as evergreen herbaceous plants, and might well be associated with them in true winter gardens.
 
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