Get thee to a fernery!

To the best of my knowledge, there was no Elizabethan slang definition for the word fernery, so you can be assured that it is only with the best of intentions that I suggest to you what I do in my title. 

Its meaning here is completely unlike Hamlet's dismissal of Ophelia with his insult suggesting where she should 'get,' but it's obvious that I paraphrased Shakespeare's line. My reasoning for doing so is this. We have a wonderfully cool, shady fern glen just a couple of minutes away from our apartment. A fernery would be a perfect place to sit and relax, maybe even read some Shakespeare; and possibly about the nunnery which Hamlet mentioned. 

And you know, thinking more about it, a fernery like ours would be a great addition to a nunnery, if by nunnery you are referring to its usual definition, and not the meaning of the Londoner's disrespectful slang. **

Our fernery is very small but I think it's an integral part of the gardens here in the village. We first enjoyed it on a hot day last summer. It seemed 10 degrees cooler under the ferns.  And I cannot enter it with out remembering my years of picking fiddlehead ferns along the Big Cedar River each spring. How could I not?  

Enough talk.  Let me show you some pictures.  

Jeanne in the fernery, on that hot day that I mentioned, gazing up into the canopy.  

This is what she sees.  

Michigan fiddleheads. Picked in the spring, just as they come out of the ground along the Big Cedar River. Boiled briefly in salted water, I always thought they tasted like a cross between asparagus and green beans. Next to several species of mushrooms, these were my favorite wild edible. 

If Michigan has fiddleheads, then New Zealand has 'double-bass fiddleheads.'  See how they grow....(This is one very massive fiddlehead unfurling right now in our fernery. The time-lapse of the photos was 8/30 to 9/30.

Here's a shot of a mini-tree fern. 

There are so many plants here that I know nothing about.  This one is a long vine-like thing that grows along the border to the fernery.  

Obviously, none of thee can get to our fernery. I hope however, that each of you can sometimes get to some restful place, whether that be in a backyard, garden, park, forest, blind, or even a favorite chair and room.  

During my working years especially, I needed to get away, usually on a Sunday afternoon, to our land, and relax and unwind before starting another hectic week.  

To me, looking up at the fronds on these black tree ferns in Henderson is not too dissimilar to looking up at the white cedar tree canopies of Wilson.   

** I've read that in Elizabethan times, (during which Shakespeare lived) nunnery was used as a slang term for a brothel.          -djf