Botanists tend to be rather easy-going people, usually. They enjoy being outdoors on field trips and seeing interesting plants … and some botanists are known for an unusual sense of humor. My own long-suffering students, over the years, have been subjected to a wide variety of clever anecdotes and amusing puns. One of my little stories involves ferns: Whenever we come up to a patch of them growing in the woods, I usually end up remarking that we must be in "Fern land," and that maybe we are near Helsinki. (I've got plenty more equally hilarious jokes, but maybe I'll share them with you at a later time.)

But seriously, folks. Ferns represent an extremely ancient plant lineage, easily dating back to the early "Carboniferous" period, some 345 million years ago, and well before the first dinosaurs. They and their relatives were instrumental in the development of vast deposits of coal, as they died and decayed, and their fossils are commonly encountered. Modern ferns are indeed vascular plants, meaning that their roots, stems and leaves contain various tissues that transport water and dissolved substances. Ferns do not produce flowers, however, nor do they produce seeds in the way that flowering plants do. Rather, ferns and their relatives reproduce by spreading tiny spores. The spores commonly originate in specialized structures, called sporangia, on the lower (bottom) sides of the fronds. Depending on the particular kind of fern, these sporangia will be arranged in a rather characteristic pattern, often as small, roughened dots on the divisions of the frond. Our Mystery fern, though, is somewhat unusual in having its sporangia not consigned to roughened dots as in many other ferns but rather at the margins of the frond's ultimate divisions, hidden away and protected by a thin, overlapping margin of leaf tissue.

It is a common fern species in deciduous forests all over the eastern United States, from New England to northern Florida, and as far west as Oklahoma. In the Southeast, you will find it in the Piedmont and mountain counties, generally away from the coast. It likes to grow in damp shady places, but it can be found in open sites. The plants come up from a horizontal stem that clings to the soil, or to rocks, and each frond has a smooth, shiny, nearly black stalk. The frond is prominently divided into many divisions, and the effect is something like a fan. The divisions of the frond are quite delicate, affording a lovely shimmering effect in the slightest breezes, such as those near waterfalls.

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John Nelson is the curator of the Herbarium at the University of South Carolina, in the department of biological sciences. As a public service, the herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, visit www.herbarium.org or call 803-777-8196.