Good morning. Today is tridi, the 3rd of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la fougère, an entire category of plant life that needs to be covered on a single day.
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Victorian England was a time and place of strange fetishes. England was flooded with treasures from its truly global empire and the people hardly knew what to do with it all. One mania that resulted was pteridomania, or a compulsive collecting of exotic ferns. This began as a relatively benign interest in having indoor plants, something that's relatable to people today, but ferns – already a common and exciting endemic species in Great Britain – were being shipped in from such far-flung places as British Columbia and New Zealand, and Englishmen of means acquired a "gotta catch 'em all" fever. To protect the plants from the rapidly worsening air pollution of London, many people constructed Wardian cases, special terrariums like miniature greenhouses. Gradually, the goal went from collecting species to collecting bizarre deformations of species, especially ferns that had grown "sports," or unusual fronds. Some species were almost collected to extinction, while others escaped captivity in new lands to become pesky weeds (particularly in Scotland). Fern patterns made their way onto everything from china to wallpaper, creating a sense that the fern is the quintessential house plant and a symbol of bourgeois comfort that is perhaps the longest-lasting legacy of pteridomania. Speaking of that legacy...
The phrase "fern bar" may reveal your age. I'm Gen X and had never heard the term until doing research for this issue, but apparently it was a craze no Baby Boomer could have missed. I can only imagine it's either a mystery or matter of secret hipster knowledge to folks on the younger end of life. But we all know exactly what a fern bar is ... or at least what it has become. And their revolution in dining and drinking were so influential that they seem permanent, like thing must have always been this way.
To be brief, a fern bar was a bar aimed at appealing to single women by decorating itself like a cozy living room, serving sugary cocktails, and providing food along the lines of "home cooking." All these seem like obvious choices now, but before the rise of the fern bar 50 years ago, they pretty much didn't exist.
