fern

Christmas Ferns
It’s early December, Christmas lights are strung, and windows, doors, and lampposts are decked with red and green, reminders of fall harvest and spring renewal. In the forest, the promise of spring is hard to find among the winter browns of the fallen leaves and the grays of tree trunks that rise coldly from the forest floor like cathedral columns. It isn’t absent, however.
Down among the brown leaves, a few patches of hopeful green reflect the warm winter’s light. While several trees and shrubs, such as hemlocks, pines, and rhododendrons, hold onto their leaves year-round, few ground-hugging herbs are evergreen, and only one of those is a common fern.
Most ferns are tender, and cannot withstand a frost, but Christmas fern is immune to the cold temperatures. In the summertime, our warm and moist Appalachians support many different ferns. In the cold of winter, Christmas fern is the only common fern, but it is found throughout the area.
Christmas fern is called by that name for at least two reasons. It is green at Christmastime, and its cut fronds often supplied the decorative greenery for the Christmas season. In addition, each small leaflet is shaped like a Christmas stocking. The large fronds are composed of about 20 pairs of these little boots lined up along both sides of the central axis of the leaf, like rows of tiny green stockings hung from the mantel. Look closely, however, for these stockings are hung by the heel.
Ferns are ancient, primitive plants. 150 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, they walked beneath tree-sized ferns instead of oak trees. These relicts, the tree ferns, remain today in the tropics in such places as Hawaii and New Zealand.
If you look closely at the fronds of a Christmas fern, you may notice that the tips of some large fronds are dead and dried up. These dried leaflets bore the reproductive spores, and once the spores were released from the plants, the leaflets died back. In the spring and summer, the undersides of the living, terminal leaflets bear small, brown, packets of spores. Ferns don’t make flowers. Instead these spores are part of their life cycle.
If you are enjoying a hike through the forest this Christmas season, have a look at a Christmas fern. They are common in most forests around Brevard, and can be found on many of the trails such as Andy Cove Nature Trail at the Pisgah Ranger Station on 276. These ferns reflect a bit of green in a world of brown and gray, a reminder of spring in the midst of winter.

Photograph: Christmas ferns provide some green in the forest during the winter season.