Primitive, lush, and beautiful--you will find ferns everywhere in Maine. The fern is the quintessential specialist in marginal habitats, and so it’s no wonder that it flourishes here. They succeed marvelously where flowering plants fail, and this may be due to their primitive nature. I like to think of them as “firstcomers.” Ferns are ancient plants, gracing the Earth as long ago as 360 million years. This means they’ve got over 200 million years on the relative newcomers--flowering plants.
You see, ferns don’t have flowers. The idea of a “flower” is revolutionary in
terms of Nature’s evolution. With its
reproductive organs now in a flower and the final results being a “seed,” it’s
no surprise that flowering plants took over the world and have dominated ever
since. Think of how many ways a seed can
be carried to a distant location and then planted. The fern is much more primitive. It reproduces with spores and has neither
flower nor seed. The spores create their
own gametes, which then fertilize to a zygote.
This grows by mitosis into another fern.
Almost animal-like in some ways, wouldn’t you say? Yet it is a vascular plant.
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| Lush ferns growing along a roadside in Maine. |
But forget about that!
Here in Maine
we love our “fiddleheads”! These are the
tender, curled-up shoots of the ostrich, lady, and bracken ferns. (Other ferns are not suitable and may make
you ill.) They are a gourmet vegetable
available in the stores here in the springtime.
Most of the ferns you see in the stores are the Ostrich fern. Fortunately, ferns can be gathered easily
enough if you know where to look, and it is possible to have a lifetime supply
of these vegetables available for free every springtime in Maine.
I am always on the lookout for foods to harvest from the wild as they
are highly nutritious (not to mention easy on the wallet).
Ferns are being studied for their interesting process known
as phytoremediation. Through this, ferns
are capable of removing heavy metals from soil and then concentrating the metals
in their fronds. The fronds can then be
removed and the process continued as the fern pulls up more and more heavy
metals. This is much safer and more
cost-effective in clearing up contaminated soils than physical or chemical
approaches. When you consider the many
sources of heavy metal contamination, such as industrial waste, vehicle
exhaustion, mining, insecticides, and fertilizers, it would behoove us all to
grow ferns wherever possible.
In the final analysis, though, I simply love ferns just
because they’re ferns. They’re so
elegant and lush. When I walk among them
daily, I feel like a queen.
