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Arcade feature #1: Beatrix Potter

Studies of hart's-tongue fern May 1901

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Sunlit Fern

Sunlight falling on a hart's-tongue fern, growing on top of a limestone rock in the bottom of Twywell Gullet.

A beautiful and striking hart’s tongue fern, Asplenium scolopendrium, at Dimmingsdale Wood in Stoke-on-Trent. According to the Woodland Trust, it’s an indicator of ancient woodlands. This species grows all over the world, but is increasingly rare in a number of places, particularly in North America, due to habitat loss. It also experiences infection with Milesina scolopendrii, hart’s tongue rust, which has an unusual lifecycle similar to better-known juniper-apple rust, Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae, in that it can alternate between infecting the hart’s tongue fern and fir trees.

Hart’s tongue fern used to be considered a medicinal “cure all”, said to help with anything from dysentery to coughs. Other ferns in its genus were called spleenworts in Europe and said to cure ailments related to the spleen, but this was just because they had spleen-shaped sori. Sympathetic magic and the doctrine of signatures, in which people believed plants would help cure ailments associated with body parts that they looked like, were popular for centuries, especially thanks to Paracelsus. Those are now recognized as pseudoscience, fortunately - many of the plants purported to have medicinal benefits due to the doctrine of signatures are toxic and/or carcinogenic. These days, hart’s tongue is used mostly as an ornamental plant, a purpose for which it is much better suited.

#Asplenium scolopendrium #hart's tongue fern #Plants of the UK #Plants of England #ethnobotany #doctrine of signatures #the doctrine of signatures was EXTREMELY dangerous and I am so glad we know better now #Plants of the United Kingdom