Pteridomania was the 19th century European craze for ferns and an obsession for collecting the rare and beautiful, just as Tulipomania had been two centuries before.
“Fern Madness” was coined by Charles Kingsley in his work Glaucus, or, The Wonders of the Shore in 1859. It was in full swing in Britain from 1850 to 1890 and spread to the United States and the Colonies.
People from all classes ventured into the bush to collect specimens – many of which were carefully pressed and kept in scrapbooks. Designer furniture and costumes with ferny motifs became enormously popular.
Collections of living ferns were often kept in specially built glasshouse ferneries or in sealed “Wardian Cases” at the homes of the well-to-do and middle-class.
Fern fronds were so popular in Victorian society, they sprouted beyond the garden into the realms of literature, religion, decorative arts, music, architecture, funerary sculpture and psychiatric care.
In no small measure, Pteridomania accounted for the enormous popularity among day trippers to the Dandenong Ranges, also made famous by painting by colonial artist Eugene von Guerard in 1857.
The problem was that many sought to take a little bit of the magic home, and the widespread plunder of the forests began.
So popular was a bit of fern napping for the home garden or pinching some fronds from the bush for the scrap book, that in 1869 one of Victoria’s earliest environmental regulations was introduced.
However, an attempt to prosecute a “fern thief” under a provision of the Lands Act (1869) ultimately failed on appeal in the Supreme Court in 1882 on the question of whether or not a tree fern was a “tree”. The full court ruled it wasn’t.
The collapse of the case, in part, helped the excision of 556 acres of the existing Dandenong Ranges Timber Reserve in 1882, which eventually became the Ferntree Gully National Park.
Australian tree ferns remain popular in home gardens both here and Europe. They can withstand dry conditions as well as heavy snow falls. They were exported in large numbers from Victorian and Tasmanian State forests as well as private land throughout 1970s to the 1990s.
Tree ferns are protected under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11535631
Source: State Library of Victoria and Mt Dandenong & District Historical Society
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-153091227/view
Victoria’s Forests & Bushfire Heritage 
