Ferns and fiddleheads
Delicate plant is perfect filler
There is nothing like the grace of a delicate fern, posing shyly in the shade of the tree canopy or on the shady side of your house.
Ferns are the perfect filler for a space where the grass grows poorly due to lack of sun. Once established in an agreeable spot, they will spread and grow up to shade out any weeds.
Ferns maintain a fresh green mass for the summer and various types turn shades of yellow to bright orange to brown in the fall.
If the shady side of a house is also exposed to north winds, ferns can stand up to a certain amount, and they are also easy to trim down if they start looking too weather-beaten.
My only disappointment with ferns is that the varieties that I’ve tried all wither when I’ve tried to use them in bouquets.
Many nurseries sell ferns and I have found that several ferns can be transplanted from the wild very easily, if you move them to similar conditions. I only move ferns in very early spring and water well at first.
Ferns have rhizomes that are like roots that spread underground but send up more plants, so I use a garden fork, rather than cutting through anything.
Ferns are more primitive than flowering plants. Like mosses, they produce spores, so they don’t flower, produce fruit or seeds. But they are more similar to flowering plants than mosses, because they also have “vascular” tissues that, like veins, transport nutrients up their stems.
This allows them to grow tall, whereas mosses stay low to the ground.
The fiddlehead is the unfurled frond of the fern. I know nothing of the edibility of other types of ferns, but the fiddlehead fern that we typically eat is the ostrich fern, named because its open frond has a rounded end, like the shape of an ostrich tail feather.
In my childhood, the fern’s annual appearance was a milestone in the race towards summer.
Each early spring trip to the river to catch small trout with my brothers required a report on how the fiddleheads were coming along.
Foraging for ferns involves exploring lovely riverside habitat and I make a point of picking each particular patch every second year, rather than every year, in order to allow recovery. A patch goes from zero to four feet in about two weeks, so frequent visits help to avoid missing the season altogether. Fiddleheads do contain a small amount of a carcinogen, so moderate seasonal intake is recommended.
The green fronds that the fern produces are called megaphylls. They collect energy from sunlight. Spores are produced for reproduction and many ferns produce spores on these fronds, which would then be called sporophylls.
Ostrich ferns send up the fronds or megaphylls first, which we eat and then they produce separate sporophylls later on, that become brown as the spores are produced. These remain standing through the winter and help you to locate them in the early spring.
The sensitive fern is also easy to transplant. It grows to about two feet and is often found in wet to medium soil.
It sends up delicate dark brown feather-shaped sporophylls that also keep their shape through the winter.
Royal ferns are another lovely local species, and the interrupted fern is aptly named because its green frond is interrupted halfway up the stalk by a section of brown spore-production.
There are a few other ferns common to our woods and wetlands, such as bracken, the evergreen Christmas fern, lady fern and varieties of woods fern. But not all ferns require shade, so note the conditions they grow in, if you’re considering adopting one.