| Ostrich fern | |
|---|---|
| Sterile fronds in summer | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| Division: | Pteridophyta |
| Class: | Pteridopsida |
| Order: | Polypodiales |
| (unranked): | Eupolypods II |
| Family: | Onocleaceae |
| Genus: | Matteuccia |
| Species: | M. struthiopteris |
| Binomial name | |
| Matteuccia struthiopteris (L.) Todaro |
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| Synonyms | |
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The ostrich fern or shuttlecock fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) is a crown-forming, colony-forming fern, occurring in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere in eastern and northern Europe, northern Asia and northern North America.
It grows from a completely vertical crown, favoring riverbanks and sandbars, but sends out lateral stolons to form new crowns. It thus can form dense colonies resistant to destruction by floodwaters.
The fronds are dimorphic, with the deciduous green sterile fronds being almost vertical, 100-170 cm tall and 20-35 cm broad, long-tapering to the base but short-tapering to the tip, so that they resemble ostrich plumes, hence the name. The fertile fronds are shorter, 40-60 cm long, brown when ripe, with highly modified and constricted leaf tissue curled over the sporangia; they develop in autumn, persist erect over the winter and release the spores in early spring.
Matteuccia species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Sthenopis auratus.
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The ostrich fern is a popular ornamental plant in gardens. While choosing a place of planting it should be taken into account that these ferns are very expansive and its leaves often lose their beauty throughout the summer, especially if not protected from wind and hail. The tightly wound immature fronds, called fiddleheads, are also used as a cooked vegetable, and are considered a delicacy mainly in rural areas of northeastern North America. The young shoots can also be eaten raw in salads or as a snack in the field.[2]
The plants are also grown in Japan, where the sprouts ("kogomi" in Japanese)[3] are a delicacy.
Matteuccia struthiopteris is the only species in the genus Matteuccia. Some sources include two Asian species, M. orientalis and M. intermedia, but molecular data shows that M. struthiopteris is more closely related to Onocleopsis and Onoclea (sensitive fern) than it is to M. orientalis and M. intermedia, and so the latter should be moved to a genus Pentarhizidium which contains those two species. [4] Formerly classified as a member of the Dryopteridaceae, Matteuccia has been reassigned to the new much smaller family Onocleaceae.