Male Fern

This grows in the garden: Male Fern, Dryopteris filix-mas. It is common in the UK, with kidney-shaped sori (bottom right). In ancient literature it is referred to as 'worm fern' because its root used to be used to treat worm infections. Filix means fern and mas means male. It was thought to be a male version of the Female Fern, Anthyrium filix-femina.

Bracken

Another late post after a very busy day and yesterday!
This is Bracken! Pteridium aquilinum. It is a fern but unusual in that the sori (spore containing bodies) lie around the periphery of the leaflets and centrally as with other ferns.
The spores are considered carcinogenic and some water is filtered to remove them.
In the past it was a useful plant, providing bedding, being used for tanning and as a fertiliser. Now it is mostly considered an invasive weed with control programmes in many environmentally sensitive sites.

Maidenhair Spleenwort

Delicate lovely little fern growing in the lean-to Victorian glass house at Stourhead National Trust property. I think this is Asplenium trichomanes ssp quadrivalens but I'm prepared to be corrected.
I find ferns tricky. Perhaps I should go on a fern course. Certainly the grass course has mitigated the fear of that group. In fact I collected around fifteen different grasses, sedges and rushes down at the reserve during my WeBS count this morning. (Watch this space.) 

Water Horsetail

I was down on Lewes Brooks RSPB reserve early this morning doing a WeBS survey and noticed the water horsetail, Equisetum fluviatile, was coming up. It has yet to develop the whorled branches but is not difficult to identify. Not all the stems develop a terminal cone. In cross-section the stems are hollow with a thin circular wall. 

Great Horsetail

 











I found this on my Ouse riverbank walk the other day. It's Great Horsetail or Equisetum telmateia. 
It's in the same division as the ferns (Pteridophyta) as it reproduces by spores rather than seeds. It's one of two species in the genus that produce non-green cone-bearing shoots in Spring before the green, branched shoots that appear in Summer.  It is one of the living fossils, being the only surviving genus from a class of plants that dominated the land back in the Carboniferous period when coal was being formed. Some species were trees reaching 30m in height.

"Equisetopsida" by Rror Licensed under

 CC BY-SA 3.0

Wall Rue

Spotted this little fella just after the violet. It's growing in a crack in the wall by a main road. So on one hand it's not particularly fussy; but on the other it only seems to grow in cracks in walls and rocks. Hence its common and latin names: wall rue, or Asplenium ruta-muraria. 
There are other wall-dwellers too, like ivy-leaved toadflax. What is it about their biology that means they only survive in such a restricted niche? There are names for plants that live on rocks: epipetric, epilithic or lithophytic. Certainly worth trying to slip one into a conversation if you can.

Common Polypody

This was growing up by the croft we stayed in on the south side of Loch Broom at about 140m above sea level (it felt higher walking up to it!). It's Polypodium vulgare or common polypody, one of our commonest pteridophytes. The underside shows the sori which develop on fertile fronds. They contain the spores and are not covered by a membrane called an indusium which is found in other ferns.
They are called polypody on account of growing from rhizomes which have lots (poly) of apparent feet (pody). They are found growing on walls (like this) and in banks, as well as on trees as epiphytes.

Hart's Tongue Fern

The first pteridophyte is one of the commonest in this country: hart's tongue fern or Asplenium scolopendrium. This one is in the garden providing a magnificent green luminosity to one of the darker corners.
Just to get the plant kingdom a bit clearer in my head: it is divided into green algae and the land plants (Embryophytes). The latter are subdivided into the non-vascular land plants (Bryophytes - essentially the mosses, hornworts and liverworts); vascular plants (Tracheophytes - mostly ferns and horsetails (Pteridophyta) and clubmosses); and seed plants (Spermatophytes - mostly the conifers (Pinophyta) and flowering plants (Magnoliophyta)). So hart's tongue is a pteridophyte (Division), and in this, it belongs to the Polypoliopsida (Class). Its order is the Polypodiales which contains around 80% of ferns. The genus belongs to the family Aspleniaceae, the only other genus being the Hymenasplenium. There are around 700 species and they are often referred to by their common name: the spleenworts (from the doctrine of signatures which held that the sori looked somewhat spleenish! (wort is just an old English word for plant.))
Apparently the pattern of the sori is reminiscent of centipede's legs and the name scolopendrium derives from the Latin for centipede - weird!