by Robbin C. Moran
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Product Description
A Natural History of Ferns is an entertaining and informative look at why ferns and their relatives are unique among plants. Ferns live in habitats from the tropics to polar latitudes, and unlike seed plants, which endow each seed with the resources to help their offspring, ferns reproduce by minute spores. There are floating ferns, ferns that climb or live on trees, and ferns that are trees. There are poisonous ferns, iridescent ferns, and resurrection ferns that survive desert heat and drought. The relations of ferns and people are equally varied. Moran sheds light on Robinson Crusoe's ferns, the role of ferns in movies, and how ferns get their names. A Natural History of Ferns provides just what is needed for those who wish to grow ferns or observe them in their habitats with greater understanding and appreciation.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent introduction to ferns, 2008-11-12
This is a highly readable introduction to ferns by Robbin Moran, a botanist at the NY Botanical Gardens. The book is at once literate, anecdotal, and scientific. You can read it for information, for instruction, and for entertainment.
How many books on botany cite both Shakespeare and a Walter Matthau movie in furthering the story of ferns? Moran spends a good part of a chapter discussing the movie, A New Leaf, which deals with Elaine May, as a botanist, discovering a new species of fern and naming it after her true love, Matthau. Indeed, Moran's enthusiasm for the movie shows no bounds--he presented it one evening at a summer workshop in Maine that I attended.
But don't get me wrong--the book is serious science with a sense of humor, sort of like a more focused version of a Stephen Jay Gould book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Great Reference Book, 2007-01-11
This book is a great scientific reference book while weaving in the history of how people discovered what we know about ferns. It has wonderful illustrations which are very detailed. It is also an interesting read even if you don't need it for a research paper. It is the most comprehensive book on the topic of ferns which we could find and one of the few which can be used extensively for a botany class.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
 the fern book you've been waiting for, 2005-04-19
Robbin C. Moran's "A natural history of ferns" takes as its subject both the ferns and the lycophytes, a group which includes the club mosses as well as Selaginella and Isoetes. He fills us in on the details of fern reproductive strategies, the lastest breakthroughs in how ferns are classified, the fossil history of ferns, some fascinating physiological and structural adaptations of ferns, the surprising patterns of fern geographical distribution and the impact of ferns on human life. He never stints on important and interesting complexities but still succeeds in making everything clear to a reader who has had
first year biology. Mr. Moran has an almost uncanny knack for selecting topics that the reader already wants to know more about(or would be curious about if he had heard even a little about them) and knowing what extra information the reader would like to have. In places it is also a good travel book, good enough to make me nostalgic for the Danish countryside.
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