Tag Archive | Wetlands
The Tasty Fern
One summer day, when I was walking along a wetland trail in New York, I was about to cross a small spring fed brook, when I happened across a muskrat. I stopped dead in my tracks to observe it without frightening the muskrat away. It walked up to a four-foot tall royal fern and proceeded […]
The Delicate Marsh Fern
An intermediate sized fern of the eastern U.S., the marsh fern prefers the wet soils of freshwater wetlands. Fern leaves are called fronds. The shape of the frond and how it is divided helps to identify it. Marsh fern has a sterile frond (a leaf without spores) with many leaflets that are also divided. Marsh […]
The Sensitive Fern
Curious? You are not going to hurt the feelings of this fern. It is a fern sensitive to cold weather and the fall frosts. Like many ferns, it grows in freshwater wetlands and moist woodlands in the eastern half of the U.S.
The Hairy Fern
One of the earliest ferns to poke through the ground in freshwater wetlands in the eastern U.S. and Canada is the Cinnamon Fern. As is true of many ferns when this plant first appears, it looks like the top of a fiddle thus it is called a fiddle head. This “fiddle” will unfurl into a […]
The “Warm-blooded” Plant
It is March and the wetlands in the northeast U.S. are still frozen. The landscape is gray with leafless trees and shrubs. The ground is covered with decaying leaves, pockets of ice and in some places snow. Yet for as bleak as this environment looks, the first sign of spring appears. Flower heads of […]
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