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Fern

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Read about Fern in the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture 

Ferns. The plants included under this name comprise an entire order, made up of several distinct families. They include plants varying in size from a hair- like creeping stem bearing a few simple, moss-like leaves, to tall trees 80 or more feet in height, with a stem or trunk nearly a foot in diameter. Singularly enough, the extremes in size are both found in tropical regions, in which most of the species abound. Most of the ordinary native species, as well as the larger part of those in cultivation, consist of an erect underground stem or rootstock with leaves, often called fronds, clustered in dense crowns, or in the cases of creeping stems with scattered leaves. In gardening parlance, other plants are sometimes called ferns, as species of lycopodium and selaginella, as well as oa em Asparagus plumosus.

In the life of an individual fern plant, two distinct phases occur, represented by two separate and unlike plants. The ordinary fern plant represents the asexual phase of growth (sporophyte), producing its spores normally in spore-cases, which are borne in masses on the back or margin of the leaf, or in. a few cases are grouped in spikes or panicles, or in rare cases spread in a layer over the entire under surface of the leaf. The sexual stage (gamelophyte) develops from the germinating spore, and consists of a tiny usually scale-like green heart- shaped prothallus, which bears the sex- organs (archegonia, female, and antheridia, male) on the under surface. After fertilization in the archegonium, the egg develops directly into a young fern plant. Many ferns also propagate vegetatively by runners or offsets, by bulblet-like buds, and in certain species the tips of the leaves bend over and take root, as in our common walking-leaf (Camptosorus, which see).

Ferns frequently hybridize. The crossing takes place naturally in the prothallium stage. They are not crossed by hand, as are the seed-plants, but from the accidental mixing when prothallia of allied species are growing together. It is a hybrid between two native species; it has been found in the wild in several parts of New England.

Great diversity has existed in the matter of the separation of the ferns into genera. Hooker, relying mainly on artificial characters drawn largely from the sorus, recognized about seventy genera only, many of them heterogeneous groups of plants with little resemblance in structure, habit or natural affinities. John Smith, relying on stem characters, Presl on variation in venation and habit,Fee, Moore,and others, have recognized a much greater number of genera, ranging from 150 to 250, or even more. In the very unequal treatment by Diels in Die Naturlichen Pflanzenfamilien (Engler & Prantl), some 120 genera are recognized. A somewhat similar difference prevails in regard to the number of species. The Synopsis Filicum of Hooker and Baker (1874), supplemented by Baker's New Ferns (1892), recognizes some 2,700 species. It is the too prevailing tendency in this work (1) to fail to recognize many valid species which have been described by German and French botanists, and (2) to mass under one name very diverse groups of species from distant quarters of the world from 8 to 10 species not infrequently appearing as a single so-called "variable species." The most recent book dealing with the whole order of ferns, the Index Filicium by Carl Christensen, recognizes approximately 150 genera and 6,000 species, and this number is continually increased as the result of further tropical exploration and more careful study. New forms are constantly coming in from the less-explored parts of the world, and within the last few years several new species have been described from the United States, including some from the better-known parts. Of this number some 200 species are in occasional cultivation in America, but the species that form the bulk of the fern trade do not exceed two dozen. In Europe several hundred species have long been in cultivation. Most of the species thrive best in the mountain regions of the tropics, the mountains of Jamaica and Java having nearly 600 species each, and the Andes also a large number. About 165 species are native in the temperate United States, representing some thirty-five genera; our native species are so widely distributed that usually not more than twenty-five to fifty will be found within the limits of one state, and the common species of the best locality do not number more than twenty. Recent explorations in southern Florida have discovered in that state the presence of a considerable number of West Indian species not found elsewhere in the United States.

The ferns are commonly classified as part of a group of spore-bearing plants, with vascular (woody) tissue in stem and leaves; this group is technically known as the Pteridophytes, and is ordinarily divided into three orders; viz., the Equisetales, including the horsetails' and scouring rushes; the Lycopodiales, including the selaginellas and the club mosses, or ground pines; and the Filicales, including the true ferns and their nearer allies. The Lycopodiales and Equi- setales are really not as closely related to ferns as this grouping would indicate. It should be noted that neither the family nor the generic limitations are in a settled condition. The researches of Bower, Lang, Jeffrey, and others have resulted in some changes of classification which are not included below because they are not complete enough. Their conclusions are undoubtedly correct but are not at present usable.

The families of the order Filicales may be distinguished as follows: 1. Ophioglossaceae. Adder's-Tongue Ferns. Herbaceous small ferns with the sporangia borne in spikes or panicles on highly modified divisions of the large fleshy foliage lvs.; prothallium tuberous, subterranean, without chlorophyll.

2. Marattiaceae. Coarse ferns with large fleshy sporangia on the under surface of the lf., arranged in circular or boat-shaped receptacles; prothallium above ground, green.

3. Hymenophyllaceae. Filmy ferns. Sporangia attached to a thread-like receptacle arising in a cup at the end of the lf.: ring complete, horizontal or oblique.

4. Osmundaceae. Flowering ferns. Coarse swamp ferns developing copious green spores early in the season: sporangia in panicles at the apex or middle of the lf. or on separate lvs.

5. Schizaeaceae. Upright or climbing ferns with ovate sporangia, which open vertically.

6. Gleicheniaceae. Terrestrial ferns with lvs. of firm texture and usually of indeterminate growth: sporangia opening vertically, in clusters of 3-6.

7. Ceratopteridaceae. Aquatic ferns with succulent foliage: sporangia very large, scattered, with a broad ring: lvs. of 2 sorts, the sterile usually floating.

8. Cyatheaceae. Mostly tree ferns with sessile or short-stalked sporangia in conspicuous receptacles, opening obliquely.

9. Polypodiaceae. Ferns with stalked sporangia, which burst transversely: sori covered with a membranous indusium or sometimes naked. This family contains three-fourths of all the ferns.

10. Marsiliaceae. Small plants rooting in mud, the lvs. either quadrifoliate or reduced to mere filamentous petioles: sporangia borne in oval conceptacles on the leaf-stalks. Often aquatic, with the leaves floating on the surface of water in pools or lakes.

11. Salviniaceae. Small or minute plants with the aspect of liverworts, floating on the surface of pools: sporangia in mostly spherical conceptacles.

The literature on the ferns is very extensive, since they have ever been attractive plants in cultivation. Many of the species have been illustrated in elaborate treatises by Schkuhr, Kunze, Hooker, Greville, Blume, Fee, Mettenius, Moore, and others. Our native species have been illustrated in the two quarto volumes of D. C. Eaton, "The Ferns of North America." A valuable summary of the more common fern species is found in Dr. Christ's "Die Farnkrauter der Erde" (1897), and a recent structural and morphological treatment is by Sadebeck, in Engler & Prantl: "Die Naturlichen Pflanzenfamilien." Schneider's "Book of Choice Ferns" is the most complete treatise on the species under cultivation. A useful American horticultural manual is Robinson's "Ferns in Their Homes and Ours." An excellent little handbook for the wild species of this country is Underwood's "Native Ferns and Their Allies."

L. M. Underwood.

R. C. Benedict.


The above text is from the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture. It may be out of date, but still contains valuable and interesting information which can be incorporated into the remainder of the article. Click on "Collapse" in the header to hide this text.


This article is about the family of pteridophyte plants. For the environmental organisation, see FERN (NGO). For the letter of the Ogham alphabet, see Fern (letter).
Ferns (Pteridophyta)
Fossil range: Early Carboniferous - Recent
Polystichum setiferum showing unrolling young frond
Polystichum setiferum showing unrolling young frond
Plant Info
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Pteridophyta

Classes
Psilotopsida

Equisetopsida
Marattiopsida
Polypodiopsida

A fern is any one of a group of about 20,000 species of plants classified in the phylum or division Pteridophyta, also known as Filicophyta. The group is also referred to as polypodiophyta, or polypodiopsida when treated as a subdivision of tracheophyta (vascular plants). The study of ferns is called pteridology; one who studies ferns is called a pteridologist. The term pteridophytes has traditionally been used to describe all seedless vascular plants so is synonymous with "ferns and fern allies". This can be confusing given that the fern phylum Pteridophyta is also sometimes referred to as pteridophytes.

A fern is a vascular plant that differs from the more primitive lycophytes in having true leaves (megaphylls), and from the more advanced seed plants (gymnosperms and angiosperms) in lacking seeds. Like all vascular plants, it has a life cycle, often referred to as alternation of generations, characterised by a diploid sporophytic and a haploid gametophytic phase. Unlike the gymnosperms and angiosperms, in ferns the gametophyte is a free-living organism. The life cycle of a typical fern is as follows:

  1. A sporophyte (diploid) phase produces haploid spores by meiosis;
  2. A spore grows by cell division into a gametophyte, which typically consists of a photosynthetic prothallus
  3. The gametophyte produces gametes (often both sperm and eggs on the same prothallus) by mitosis
  4. A mobile, flagellate sperm fertilizes an egg that remains attached to the prothallus
  5. The fertilized egg is now a diploid zygote and grows by mitosis into a sporophyte (the typical "fern" plant).

Fern ecology

Ferns have a popular image of growing in moist, shady woodland nooks, but the reality is far more complex. Ferns grow in a wide variety of habitats, ranging from remote mountain elevations to dry desert rock faces to bodies of water to open fields. Ferns in general may be thought of as largely being specialists in marginal habitats, often succeeding in places where various environmental delimiters limit the success of flowering plants. On the other hand, some ferns are among the world's most serious weed species, such as the bracken growing in the British highlands, or the mosquito fern (Azolla) growing in tropical lakes. There are four particular types of habitats that are often key places to find ferns: the afore-mentioned moist, shady forest cove; the sheltered rock face, especially when sheltered from the full sun; acid bogs and swamps; and tropical trees, where many species are epiphytes.

Many ferns depend on associations with mycorrhizal fungi. Many ferns only grow within specific pH ranges; for instance, the climbing fern (Lygodium) of eastern North America will only grow in moist, intensely acid soils, while the bulblet bladder fern (Cystopteris bulbifera) with overlapping range is only ever found on limestone

Fern structure

 
Ferns at the Royal Melbourne Botanical Gardens
 
Tree ferns, probably Dicksonia antarctica

Like the sporophytes of seed plants, those of ferns consist of:

  • Stems: Most often an underground creeping rhizome, but sometimes an above-ground creeping stolon (e.g., Polypodiaceae), or an above-ground erect semi-woody trunk (e.g., Cyatheaceae) reaching up to 20 m in a few species (e.g., Cyathea brownii on Norfolk Island and Cyathea medullaris in New Zealand).
  • Leaf: The green, photosynthetic part of the plant. In ferns, it is often referred to as a frond, but this is because of the historical division between people who study ferns and people who study seed plants, rather than because of differences in structure. New leaves typically expand by the unrolling of a tight spiral called a crozier or fiddlehead. This uncurling of the leaf is termed circinate vernation. Leaves are divided into two types:
    • Trophophyll: A leaf that does not produce spores, instead only producing sugars by photosynthesis. Analogous to the typical green leaves of seed plants.
    • Sporophyll: A leaf that produces spores. These leaves are analogous to the scales of pine cones or to stamens and pistil in gymnosperms and angiosperms, respectively. Unlike the seed plants, however, the sporophylls of ferns are typically not very specialized, looking similar to trophophylls and producing sugars by photosynthesis as the trophophylls do.
  • Roots: The underground non-photosynthetic structures that take up water and nutrients from soil. They are always fibrous and are structurally very similar to the roots of seed plants.

The gametophytes of ferns, however, are very different from those of seed plants. They typically consist of:

  • Prothallus: A green, photosynthetic structure that is one cell thick, usually heart- or kidney-shaped, 3-10 mm long and 2-8 mm broad. The thallus produces gametes by means of:
    • Antheridia: Small spherical structures that produce flagellate sperm.
    • Archegonia: A flask-shaped structure that produces a single egg at the bottom, reached by the sperm by swimming down the neck.
  • Rhizoids: root-like structures (not true roots) that consist of single greatly-elongated cells, water and mineral salts are absorbed over the whole structure. Rhizoids anchor the prothallus to the soil.

Evolution and classification

Ferns first appear in the fossil record in the early-Carboniferous period. By the Triassic, the first evidence of ferns related to several modern families appeared. The "great fern radiation" occurred in the late-Cretaceous, when many modern families of ferns first appeared.

Ferns have traditionally been grouped in the Class Filices, but modern classifications assign them their own division in the plant kingdom, called Pteridophyta.

Traditionally, three discrete groups of plants have been considered ferns: two groups of eusporangiate ferns--families Ophioglossaceae (adders-tongues, moonworts, and grape-ferns) and Marattiaceae--and the leptosporangiate ferns. The Marattiaceae are a primitive group of tropical ferns with a large, fleshy rhizome, and are now thought to be a sibling taxon to the main group of ferns, the leptosporangiate ferns. Several other groups of plants were considered "fern allies": the clubmosses, spikemosses, and quillworts in the Lycopodiophyta, the whisk ferns in Psilotaceae, and the horsetails in the Equisetaceae. More recent genetic studies have shown that the Lycopodiophyta are only distantly related to any other vascular plants, having radiated evolutionarily at the base of the vascular plant clade, while both the whisk ferns and horsetails are as much "true" ferns as are the Ophioglossoids and Marattiaceae. In fact, the whisk ferns and Ophioglossoids are demonstrably a clade, and the horsetails and Marattiaceae are arguably another clade.

One possible means of treating this situation is to consider only the leptosporangiate ferns as "true" ferns, while considering the other three groups as "fe rn allies". In practice, numerous classification schemes have been proposed for ferns and fern allies, and there has been little consensus among them. A new classification by Smith et al. (2006) is based on recent molecular systematic studies, in addition to morphological data. This classification divides ferns into four classes:

  • Psilotopsida
  • Equisetopsida
  • Marattiopsida
  • Polypodiopsida

The last group includes most plants familiarly known as ferns. Modern research supports older ideas based on morphology that the Osmundaceae diverged early in the evolutionary history of the leptosporangiate ferns; in certain ways this family is intermediate between the eusporangiate ferns and the leptosporangiate ferns.

A more complete classification scheme (with alternative names in brackets) follows:

Economic uses

Ferns are not as important economically as seed plants but have considerable importance. Ferns of the genus Azolla are very small, floating plants that do not look like ferns. Called mosquito fern, they are used as a biological fertilizer in the rice paddies of southeast Asia, taking advantage of their ability to fix nitrogen from the air into compounds that can then be used by other plants. A great many ferns are grown in horticulture as landscape plants, for cut foliage and as houseplants, especially the Boston fern (Nephrolepis exaltata). Several ferns are noxio us weeds or invasive species, including Japanese climbing fern (Lygodium japonicum), mosquito fern and sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis). Giant water fern (Salvinia molesta) is one of the world's worst aquatic weeds. The important fossil fuel coal consists of the remains of primitive plants, including ferns.

Other ferns with some economic significance include:

Cultural connotations

In Slavic folklore, ferns are believed to bloom once a year, during the Ivan Kupala night. Although it's exceedingly difficult to find, anyone who takes a look of a fern-flower will be happy and rich for the rest of his life. Similarly in Finland, the tradition holds that one who finds the seed of a fern in bloom on Midsummer night, will by the possession of it be able to travel under a glamour of invisibility and shall be guided to the locations where eternally blazing Will o' the wisps mark the spot of hidden treasure caches.

Misunderstood names

Several non-fern plants are called "ferns" and are sometimes popularly believed to be ferns in error. These include:

  • "Asparagus fern" - This may apply to one of several species of the monocot genus Asparagus, which are flowering plants. A better name would be "fern asparagus".
  • "Sweetfern" - This is a shrub of the genus Comptonia.
  • "Air fern" - This is an unrelated aquatic animal that is related to a coral; it is harvested, dried, dyed green, then sold as plant that can "live on air". It looks like a fern but is actually a skeleton.

In addition, the book Where the Red Fern Grows has elicited many questions about the mythical "red fern" named in the book. There is no such known plant, although there has been speculation that the Oblique grape-fern, Sceptridium dissectum, could be referred to here, because it is known to appear on disturbed sites and its fronds may redden over the winter.

Gallery

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References

  • Pryer, Kathleen M., Harald Schneider, Alan R. Smith, Raymond Cranfill, Paul G. Wolf, Jeffrey S. Hunt and Sedonia D. Sipes. 2001. Horsetails and ferns are a monophyletic group and the closest living relatives to seed plants. Nature 409: 618-622 (abstract here).
  • Pryer, Kathleen M., Eric Schuettpelz, Paul G. Wolf, Harald Schneider, Alan R. Smith and Raymond Cranfill. 2004. Phylogeny and evolution of ferns (monilophytes) with a focus on the early leptosporangiate divergences. American Journal of Botany 91:1582-1598 (online abstract here).
  • Moran, Robbin C. (2004). A Natural History of Ferns. Portland, OR: Timber Press. ISBN 0-88192-667-1.
  • Lord, Thomas R. (2006). Ferns and Fern Allies of Pennsylvania. Indiana, PA: Pinelands Press. [1]
  • Smith, A. R., K. M. Pryer, E. Schuettpelz, P. Korall, H. Schneider & P. G. Wolf. 2006. A classification for extant ferns. Taxon 55(3):705–731.

See also

External links

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