For my homage to Anna Atkin’s books of cyanotypes — which will be a part of an upcoming issue of Refilstigr — I picked a native fern I found while bicycling in the hills not far from where we live. It is a Dryopteris arguta, commonly named coastal woodfern.
Ferns are one of the oldest groups of plants on Earth. I like to call them dinosaur plants, but to be more accurate: the first ferns appeared 100 million … maybe 200 million … years before the dinosaurs appeared. However, those ferns died out. The ferns we have today — around 10,500 different species — evolved maybe 70 million years ago, so they were around for a few million years before the dinosaurs went extinct.
Exposure The fern on top of the prepared paper inside of the contact print frame, getting exposed to sunlight for seven minutes on an early afternoon in late October. Photo: Martin HøyemFix After the exposure is finished, I rinse and fix the print in the bathroom sink. Mostly I just leave the print for 10-15 minutes in the water-filled tray, but I also give it a quick rinse under running water. Photo and print: Martin HøyemEarth rotation and photography Some early trials I did resulted in blurry images, and I hypothesize that it was because I left them for too long in the sun. (The earth revolves, and this means the angle of the light coming from the sun changes during exposure. Thus, if I leave the photo too long exposing in the sun, I get a blurry image.) The image above was exposed for seven minutes, which seemed to give a fairly sharp image. Photo and print: Martin HøyemFern-colored? I needed to add a title to each print, which I would handwrite with fountain pen. I have mixed an ink previously, which I named Woodvardia after Woodvardia fimbriata — the giant chain fern. I think it would be a natural ink choice for this artwork. (For more on that particular ink, see the image caption on top of this page: “Fountain pen archival records”) Photo: Martin HøyemI ♥ hearts Not to get off track, but isn’t that heart shaped breather hole in the fountain pen nib THE BEST!?! Fuck yeah, uncredited fountain pen nib designer!!! Photo: Martin HøyemThe natural habitat The Dryopteris arguta in the landscape. Photo: Martin HøyemSporangia Most plants have flowers and reproduce through seeds. The ferns do not. They reproduce via spores. The spores are produced inside sporangia, and sporangia cluster together in what are called sori. Similar to what we see on many other ferns, the sori of the Dryopteris segura sits on the underside of the pinnae, which is what the photo above shows. Photo: Martin HøyemHooker’s green This is an illustration from William Jackson Hooker’s Garden ferns; or, Coloured figures and descriptions, with the needful analyses of the fructification and venation, of a selection of exotic ferns adapted for cultivation in the garden, hothouse, and conservatory from 1862. This book was published in the midst of the fern craze of the Victorian age. William Hooker was the same guy who invented Hooker’s green, a hue of green particularly fitted for botanical illustrations.Cornell University LibraryDinoasur plant This is perhaps Polystichum munitum, often known as western sword fern, in the gardens of the Gamble House. Shot on Kodak-Tri-X 400 ISO with my Olympus-35 SP (the camera was manufactured April 1970). The film was developed kitchen sink style. Photo: Martin Høyem.
Bibliography
Atkins, Anna and Anne Dixon. Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns. England, 1853.
Hershey, David R. “Doctor Ward's Accidental Terrarium.” In The American Biology Teacher 58(5):276-281.
Hooker, William Jackson. Garden ferns; or, Coloured figures and descriptions, with the needful analyses of the fructification and venation, of a selection of exotic ferns adapted for cultivation in the garden, hothouse, and conservatory. London: Lovell Reeve, 1862.
Moore, Thomas. The ferns of Great Britain and Ireland. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857.
