Festooning Ferns

A bridge, some plants, and a small world connection

Recently, I had the pleasure to go on a short walk up in Bellingham with my good pal, the splendid writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt. My wife and I were up north for me to give a talk at Village Books about Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales and before my talk Lyanda took us to some of her favorite spots. One destination, about 200 yards from the car, was Whatcom Falls, where water drops twenty feet over a sandstone ledge. It’s a rather lovely spot of water, trees, and rocks but what fascinated me most was the bridge spanning the creek.

Built in 1939 and 1940, it’s a classic Works Progress Administration structure, both aesthetically pleasing and built with local material. With a graceful single arch spanning the creek and topped by additional arches on the bridge walkway, the Stone Bridge has a simple elegance. From a geological point of view, it incorporates local building material, the 50- to 55-million-year old Chuckanut Sandstone, in this case salvaged in 1938 from the Pike Building in downtown Bellingham. Workers saved 9,500 squares of stone, 95 large windows, 25 plate glass windows, and 25,000 bricks, all of which ended up in other projects.

(Despite what many websites aver, the arches in the bridge have nothing to do with the arches in the former building. Nor was the building salvaged because of fire. A blaze had indeed taken place, in 1931, but the Pike was usable until the decision to raze it in 1938. Investigators quickly determined that a young man named Alfred Anderson had started the 1931 fire. He said that he had been paid $100 by Wayne Fuller, who had a $30,000 mortgage on the building and hoped to collect insurance money. Sentenced to 30 months in jail, Fuller escaped but was quickly caught, which allowed to him getting to know his prison cell in Walla Walla a bit better than he hoped.)

Built in 1891 as the Bellingham Bay National Bank and later owned by Leonard Pike and occupied by Puget Sound Power & Light Company. Photo used courtesy of the Whatcom Museum.

Like so many other WPA projects I have encountered over the years, particularly ones in wilder locations, such as national parks and forests, the bridge seems to merge with the landscape, as if it was a natural feature. I am always amazed by these projects, where builders and designers clearly wanted to build something beautiful. They didn’t have to do so—WPA projects around the country were primarily set up to provide jobs—and yet most have an refined beauty that has persisted for almost a century.

As much I enjoyed the rock and architecture of the bridge, I was equally enchanted with the foliage adorning it. Lush and moist, moss painted the sandstone blocks in a verdurous mat that softened edges. More dramatic was the leafy licorice fern, particularly as it mustachioed the bridge’s support arch, making the bridge seem even more natural in its surroundings.

Known scientifically as Polypodium glycyrrhiza, licorice fern acquired its common and scientific names from the plant’s sweet rhizomes, which have a bittersweet licorice flavor. They are one of the few ferns consumed by Indigenous people of the Pacific Coast. According to ethnobotanist Nancy Turner, several British Columbia First Nations used the rhizomes medicinally for colds and sore throats and Haida people ate them before drinking water, as it sweetened the flavor. Kwakiutl hunters and berry pickers also “sucked them [rhizomes] to keep from going hungry” but a chief wouldn’t eat the inside of the rhizome because “he will always waver in his mind about giving away blankets, for one side of his brain will forbid him to give away blankets” at potlatches, according to Franz Boas, in Ethnology of the Kwakiutl.

I certainly understand the choice of calling these plants licorice fern but another name could also be festoon fern. Pass by any of our native bigleaf maples (Acer macrophyllum), particularly the larger, older ones and you’ll see a carpet of ferns gracing the trunk and branches. An average tree will have more than 75 pounds of epiphytes (ferns, moss, liverworts, and lichens) growing on it. Even more astounding, the epiphyte leaf biomass makes up less than two percent of aboveground plant biomass yet this is four times that of the plant’s leaves. One of the advantages of living in our moist maritime Pacific Northwest climate is that life finds many ways to thrive from bridges to branches to roofs.

I think these may be licorice ferns doing their festooning thing but perhaps they are narrowleaf sword fern (Polystichum imbricans).

Word of the week - small world - Turns out that my wife’s great grandfather worked in the Pike Building. According to a September 7, 1910, article in the American Reveille, Leslie Coffin was manager of the Whatcom County Railway and Light Company, which had just leased space in the Pike Building. Leslie’s first job was to remodel the space for the workers and the Bellingham-Skagit Interurban depot, which the company would start building in November 1910. I like to think that he also liked the lovely Chuckanut Sandstone building blocks.

Thanks kindly to Jeff Jewell, Research Technician in the Photo Archives at the Whatcom Museum for answering my questions about the Pike Building.