Fern

Ferns make up the class Polypodiopsida, a large group of vascular plants, more than 10,500 living species, that bear neither flowers nor seeds and spread instead by spores. Each spore grows into a small, short-lived plant that reproduces sexually, and from it rises the fern as we know it, whose leaves, called fronds, often unfurl from tightly coiled fiddleheads. The group goes back to the late Silurian, some 423 million years, though most of the ferns living today belong to a branch that diversified in the Cretaceous, alongside the flowering plants. Ferns grow almost everywhere, most richly in the tropics and least in the Arctic, favouring shady woods, rock crevices, acid bogs and the branches of rainforest trees. A few, bracken among them, are serious weeds; others are eaten as young fiddleheads or kept as houseplants, and the Victorians went through a collecting craze, pteridomania, that gave rise to the glazed Wardian case. In Slavic legend the fern flowers once a year, on Ivan Kupala night, and whoever sees the bloom will be happy and rich for life. Cunningham treats the fern as protective, whether set among cut flowers, planted by the doorstep or kept indoors. Burnt out of doors it is said to bring rain, its smoke drives off snakes, and carrying it is meant to lead the bearer to treasure. Biting the first frond of spring is held to ward off toothache until the next.