Natural Lowcountry: Bracken fern best admired from a distance

Now that spring is here, bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) has been popping up everywhere.

Over the winter, the plant turned brown and all but disappeared, but now it’s re-emerging from an extensive network of rhizomes, or underground stems.

The new young leaves, called fiddleheads, are at first tightly coiled, unfurling bit by bit as they grow.

Mature leaves (fronds) are stiff and coarse, have a distinctive triangular shape, and are finely divided into many small leaflets. Usually they’re several feet long, sometimes even bigger.

Bracken is one of the world’s most widely distributed ferns, found almost everywhere except where it’s extremely cold or dry.

Here in the Lowcountry, bracken thrives along roadsides and bike paths, and in woods, clearings, and abandoned meadows. It’s often one of the first plants to colonize burned or recently cleared ground.

In Britain, it’s a prominent and evocative plant of the moors.

Like other ferns - there are some 12,000 species - bracken produces neither flowers, seeds, nor fruits.

Look for rows of small, raised brown dots (sori) on the underside of some of the fronds; each sorus comprises clusters of tiny sacs packed with spores. A single bracken frond may release as many as 300 million spores into the air.

If a spore lands in a moist and sheltered spot, it grows into a tiny, shapeless green mass about a quarter of an inch across and a single cell thick. This miniscule bisexual plant, called a prothallus, gives rise via a fertilized egg to the familiar fern plant, which slowly develops leaves, roots, rhizomes, and eventual independence from the prothallus.

Established clumps of bracken also spread vegetatively each year from their rhizomes; some clones are thought to be over 1,000 years old.

Bracken has a long history of human use as a diuretic, tonic, antiseptic, ointment, fertilizer, and astringent. The fiddleheads have been used for food by many cultures, and today bracken is still eaten in Korea, China, Japan and Taiwan.

Scientists now know that bracken contains a host of toxic substances. These include thiaminase, which causes vitamin deficiency and illness in livestock, and ptalquiloside, which has been linked to esophageal and stomach cancer in humans. Since ptalquiloside is water-soluble and also damaged by high temperatures, some people claim that bracken is safe to eat in small quantities if the fiddleheads are first blanched or boiled, then sautéed.

I used to gather and cook bracken fiddleheads during my camping days, long ago.

They taste somewhat like asparagus and are actually quite good.

However, the British Royal Horticultural Society and other authorities now warn against eating young bracken leaves -- advice I think is worth considering.

Bracken is a beautiful fern, best admired from a distance.

This story was originally published March 29, 2016 at 6:25 AM with the headline "Natural Lowcountry: Bracken fern best admired from a distance."