Fern Forest at Dusk

About this work

The picture is built in layers. At the back, tall tree trunks and the canopy form a dark wall, almost a curtain, that keeps the space close and quiet. In front, the ferns rise in a broad band through the foreground and middle ground, and the light falls across them so that some fronds gleam gold and ochre while others sink into green shadow. That play of lit and unlit leaves gives the scene depth and a sense of the sun going down somewhere out of view. The eye moves along the glowing tips rather than towards any single point. Close up, individual fronds and leaflets are clearly separated; from a distance, the whole lower half becomes a warm, flickering glow beneath the darkness of the trees.

Ferns are among the oldest groups of land plants, already growing in forests more than 300 million years ago, long before the first flowers. They have never made seeds. Instead, tiny spores form in small clusters, often brown, on the underside of the fronds and drift away on the air. A spore that lands somewhere damp grows into a small, flat, heart-shaped plant, and fertilisation needs a film of water, since the male cells have to swim to the egg. That is one reason ferns crowd into shady, moist woodland like this. The invisible spores also fed an old belief in magical fern seed: in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, a character boasts that with fern-seed they walk invisible.

In a living room or study it is at its best in the evening, when a low lamp echoes the light on the fronds, and it sits naturally on deep green, charcoal, olive or warm white walls. Because it is not tied to any season, it works all year round. A dark bronze or black frame suits the shadows. The print file is 7680 × 4320 px, about 65 cm wide at 300 dpi, a comfortable width above a sofa or sideboard. The separate 4K TV pack holds 3840 × 2160 for the Samsung Frame or any 4K art-mode TV, plus 2560 × 1440 and 1920 × 1080. Fern Forest in Gold makes a natural companion, and The Royal Fern adds a single upright frond in portrait.