"The term fern is often misused. Examples of this are the unrelated asparagus fern (a flowering plant) and sweet fern (a flowering shrub of the Comptonia genus). Even a group of animals called hydrozoans, distantly related to jellyfish and coral, are named air ferns. Their skeletons are dried, dyed green, and falsely sold as a plant that lives on air."
"Ferns Types The word fern may derive from the Anglo-Saxon contraction fepern or German Farn, both derived from Sanskrit parna, meaning "feather" or "wing. "Some authors suggest it derives from farr (a bullock), from its use as livestock bedding. These words ultimately trace back to Proto-Germanic "farną," which is also related to the Latin "fērnum" and Ancient Greek "peron" or "pteron," all of which refer to ferns or fern-like plants."
Ferns are ancient vascular plants that produce spores and date back to the Middle Devonian, about 390 million years ago. The Polypodiales, which comprise roughly 80% of modern ferns, arose about 180 million years ago. The term 'fern' is often misapplied to unrelated flowering plants like asparagus fern and sweet fern, and to dried hydrozoan skeletons sold as 'air ferns'. Ferns likely evolved from green algae and developed vascular tissue and underground rhizomes. Ferns occupy diverse habitats from forest shade and deserts to swamps and aquatic environments, with tree ferns reaching heights over twenty meters.
Read at Alternative Medicine Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]