Ferns in the Forest: A Fairy Tale

By Madeleine Bray
Ferns are a common sight in Ontario’s forests, and come in all shapes and sizes. There is a fantastical whimsy to these fronds, spreading out to cover forest floors and provide a lush green to understories. Unchanged from their early beginnings, these living fossils may appear delicate and frilly, like the Lady Fern, or grand and almost imposing, like the Ostrich Fern.

Regardless of their appearance, these are hardy plants that have remained mostly unchanged over the span of millions of years. With their ancient roots, these plants provided a mystery that had imaginations running wild.
Ferns have an interesting life history as non-flowering plants. Enthusiasts of the past, upon seeing no flower developing between fronds, were mystified by how it could reproduce. With no fruit and certainly no visible seeds, it was like nothing they had ever seen. At some point, it was determined that these plants must have had invisible flowers. Of course, invisible flowers would require invisible pollinators. These delicate fronds had to be pollinated by fairies, the notorious invisible troublemakers that often explained away unknown phenomena!

With invisible flowers and invisible pollinators, it only stood to reason that there would be equally invisible seeds. Such seeds were only visible on Midsummer’s night, the shortest night of the year, and if someone found one, it would render them invisible to onlookers.

As scientific understanding of the outside world developed, these fairytales became nothing more than myth once scientists understood how ferns reproduced. Though not fantastical, the life history of ferns is still fascinating. The modern understanding of ferns is that these are old plants, found unchanged from their ancestors in the fossil record dating back millions of years. Ferns such as the Bracken Fern have a global distribution, a testament to their ability to remain the same over time. These plants thrived in ancient fields and forests well before complex flowering structures evolved and dominated the landscape.

Ferns, like mosses, reproduce using spores. These spores can originate from small structures called sori (singular sorus) that develop on the underside of fern leaves, speckling the surface with brown spots. The spores themselves are scarcely visible to the naked eye, and scatter in the wind like fairy dust much in the way pollen does.

There are hints of scientists’ fantastical ponderings into the nature of ferns in their names. Wood ferns were classified as the genus Dryopteris, from two root words meaning “dryad wings”. There are Lady Ferns, Maidenhair Ferns, Sensitive Ferns, and even Walking Ferns native to Ontario. These names are a reminder that we are always learning more about the world around us, and that misunderstandings of the past can still be looked at fondly, even with new knowledge.

Forests can be mystifying at first, and magical in their own regard. There is always something new to discover and learn about the plants in our own backyards, or those that we see on our favourite hike. Go out, explore, and let your imagination run free!