Snake Like Adder’s Tongue
The adder’s-tongue fern, or Ophioglossum crotalophoroides, is a bizarre plant in a very small package. Here is a fern that you won’t see unless you are way down on the ground, at least on your hands and knees, or better yet, crawling around in the grass. It is only a few inches tall, emerging from the ground in the late winter and early spring. It is one of those tiny little plants that is really delightful, but that is not very well known. You can find it pushing out of the ground right now, usually in open lawns, roadsides, and grassy ditches.
The best way to find oddball plants like this is to carefully designate a small patch of ground, and then get down there and carefully examine it inch by inch. (Sometimes you will be surprised at how many different kinds of plants you will find doing this.) This particular fern species is very widespread, known to occur from eastern Texas and Missouri all the way to Florida and the Carolinas, at low elevations. Because it is tiny, it is frequently overlooked, though, and it may be more common than we think. Interestingly, it turns out that rural cemeteries are one of the best habitats for this plant and its near relatives.
This fern is a member of a peculiar genus — one that was named by Carl Linnaeus. All the species in this genus have a short, stumpy underground stem, something like a small bulb, or perhaps a tiny gladiolus corm, and they produce an odd-looking little green stem-like shoot, as well as a few leaves of various shapes. The tip of this little shoot will bear a segmented series of sporangia. Linnaeus, always happy to name plants based on what they looked like, observed that the spore-bearing shoot resembles the tongue of a snake, and the name he gave to the genus retains this fanciful comparison. The species pictured here is one of about eight different North American species.
So, we can imagine Mr. Wallace crawling around on an open, sunny lawn one fine March day way back when, perhaps on or near his plantation in present-day Berkeley County. He was impressed that this species does resemble the tongue of a snake, and he recognized that the spore-bearing shoot tip looks something like the rattles of a rattlesnake. So he continued the nomenclatural fun by coming up with an epithet that allows this species name to be translated as: “The snake-tongue plant that carries a small rattlesnake”... but don’t worry, it won’t bite!
The best way to find oddball plants like this is to carefully designate a small patch of ground, and then get down there and carefully examine it inch by inch. (Sometimes you will be surprised at how many different kinds of plants you will find doing this.) This particular fern species is very widespread, known to occur from eastern Texas and Missouri all the way to Florida and the Carolinas, at low elevations. Because it is tiny, it is frequently overlooked, though, and it may be more common than we think. Interestingly, it turns out that rural cemeteries are one of the best habitats for this plant and its near relatives.
This fern is a member of a peculiar genus — one that was named by Carl Linnaeus. All the species in this genus have a short, stumpy underground stem, something like a small bulb, or perhaps a tiny gladiolus corm, and they produce an odd-looking little green stem-like shoot, as well as a few leaves of various shapes. The tip of this little shoot will bear a segmented series of sporangia. Linnaeus, always happy to name plants based on what they looked like, observed that the spore-bearing shoot resembles the tongue of a snake, and the name he gave to the genus retains this fanciful comparison. The species pictured here is one of about eight different North American species.
So, we can imagine Mr. Wallace crawling around on an open, sunny lawn one fine March day way back when, perhaps on or near his plantation in present-day Berkeley County. He was impressed that this species does resemble the tongue of a snake, and he recognized that the spore-bearing shoot tip looks something like the rattles of a rattlesnake. So he continued the nomenclatural fun by coming up with an epithet that allows this species name to be translated as: “The snake-tongue plant that carries a small rattlesnake”... but don’t worry, it won’t bite!
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