I’ve always loved coming upon a field of ferns while walking in the woods. Something about the cool, damp places that they usually grow is very inviting to me. I was excited to begin this fern study with my girls, but because of the DLM’s late April injury which put him in a cast and unable to walk for almost a month, we were quite limited in our mobility outdoors. Add to that the fact that this spring has already been extremely hot (and I hated to take the DLM out in it when I knew he’d be uncomfortable) and we’ve heard rumors that this is a particularly “snakey” spring, I didn’t exactly feel comfortable tromping about in the woods like I usually would.
Enter my mother’s flower bed. 
My mother loves flowers and spends the better part of every spring outdoors, beautifying her yard, transplanting this here and that there, and generally just reveling in nature. My dad recently retired, so now she has a handyman and helper, too. When I asked her about any ferns she has that we could observe, she assured me that she had what I consider a “regular” fern, in addition to the bridal wreath fern that we also have growing in our front flower bed by our mail box. (The bridal wreath fern has a beautiful, deep purple bloom and doesn’t look like a fern much at all to me. But what do I know? I now realize that ferns do not flower at all, so this cannot be a fern, but I do not not know what it is.) We headed out to my parents one Friday immediately following lunch, only to find that Mamaw wasn’t home. Papaw was working in the yard, but unfortunately, he didn’t know the location of the fern to which Mamaw referred. This, of course, mean that we had to study the bridal wreath “fern” after all, since it has a place up-front and center in her front flower bed.
Mamaw's "ferns' hadn't bloomed at the time, but this was taken a couple of weeks later in our yard.
Any idea what this bubbly, foamy looking stuff is?
I thought it would be fun to incorporate one of Barb’s suggestions in her fern study post–making leaf prints with ink.
My nature journal entry
Louise also decided to sketch the "fern"
We all really enjoyed doing the ink printing. I only wished I had had the foresight to purchase more ink colors!
Mamaw came home right before we left and showed me the location of the real fern. Alas, I had lost the girls by this time to the siren call of the horses, popsicles, and a cartoon on television.
I, however, did enjoy walking around the yard and enjoying some other beauties:
clematis
tulip poplar
Thankfully, I had a chance to redeem this fern study a bit when we went to the Huntsville Botanical Gardens the next week.
Although this was something of a botched study (only in the fact that we thought we were studying ferns all along), I do think the girls will remember that ferns have spores.
In addition to doing all the observing, sketching, and talking about the “ferns” at my parents’ house, we also watched one of the videos that Barb linked to her in fern post and read a short juvenile nonfiction book about ferns. (Papaw also read it aloud to the DLM.)
The more nature study I intitiate, the more I realize I don’t know. (This seems to be a refrain here.) I did do a bit of prep work by reading in The Handbook of Nature Study before even beginning this study with my girls, but somehow the important fact that ferns don’t flower never registered in my brain (and I never deduced it logically, either, I mean–duh!–ferns reproduce by spores!) Still, I soldier on. I really do feel like we’re getting something out of this. I am giving my children “pegs,” as we like to call them in classical education circles–they can recognize plants and animals and categorize them, and that’s a sight more than I could do at their ages.
I have to give a plug to my bloggy buddy Janet and her new blog, Discovering Nature. Janet writes about what she and her girls discover through their own nature studies (about which they are quite passionate!), and her photography skills are superb. She knows a whole lot more about ferns than I do, too. 
I’m submitting this entry to this month’s OHC Carnival. You are getting Barb’s newletters, right?