Frances Theodora Parsons (1861-1952) grew up in New York City and spent summers with her grandparents in upstate New York. After marrying her first husband, a naval officer, Parsons traveled the world, autonomously seeking outdoor activity at her husband’s varied stations, and expressing, “the pleasure we take in literature, as in travel, is enhanced by a knowledge of nature” (How to Know the Ferns). During this time Parsons experiences both the death of an infant and her husband. Author Mary Finger accounts for the way the young Parsons coped with her widow status: “Grief stricken, still in her twenties, and bound by the Victorian convention of a long period of mourning and retirement of society, she turned to work on the book as a distraction from sorrow.” The use of the cyclical natural world to explore a human lifetime is reflected in the statement she makes in her book How to Know the Ferns. Parsons asks, “Is it that in the midst of death we have a foretaste of life; a prophecy of the great yearly resurrection which even now we may anticipate?”
Parsons sought not to preciously separate nature as an off-limit place but to put botanic facts in the form of two books “within the brains and purse” of the “average” person. Parsons notably stated that, when in the wilderness, “at our very feet lie wonders for whose elucidation a lifetime would be far too short” (How to Know the Wild Flowers). Her ongoing attempt at a description of nature is a compelling and often charming force. Parsons, with a naturalists’ approach, has this to say about the Virginia Chain Fern:
In the low, damp ground near the coast one may expect to find this fern; its haunts, where the narrow path winds between tall masses of sweet-pepper bush and wet meadows where pogonia and calopogon delight us in July, and the white-fringed orchids may be found in later summer, are among the most beautiful of the many beautiful kinds of country that the fern and flower lover knows, to which his feet stray inevitably in the season of green things, and which are the solace of his ‘inward eye’ when that season is past. (How to Know the Ferns)
In the low, damp ground near the coast one may expect to find this fern; its haunts, where the narrow path winds between tall masses of sweet-pepper bush and wet meadows where pogonia and calopogon delight us in July, and the white-fringed orchids may be found in later summer, are among the most beautiful of the many beautiful kinds of country that the fern and flower lover knows, to which his feet stray inevitably in the season of green things, and which are the solace of his ‘inward eye’ when that season is past. (How to Know the Ferns)
