The range of the Broad Beech Fern extends farther south than does that of its two kinsmen, neither of which are found, I believe, south of Virginia. It seeks also more open and usually drier woods. Its leaves are fragrant.
Williamson says that its fronds are easily decolorized and that they form a "good object for double-staining, a process well known to microscopists."
51. OAK FERN
Phegopteris Dryopteris
Northeastern United States to Virginia, west to Oregon and Alaska, usually in wet woods, with stalks six to nine inches long.
Fronds.—Usually longer than broad, four to nine inches long, broadly triangular, the three primary divisions widely spreading, smooth, once or twice-pinnate; fruit-dots small, round, near the margin; indusium, none.
PLATE XXXVI
OAK FERN
So far as I remember, my first encounter with the Oak Fern was in a cedar swamp, famous for its growth of showy lady's-slippers. One July day in the hope of finding in flower some of these orchids, I visited this swamp. It lay in a semi-twilight, caused by the dense growth of cedars and hemlocks. Prostrate on the spongy sphagnum below were hosts of uprooted trees, so overrun with trailing strands of partridge-vine, twin-flower, gold-thread, and creeping snowberry, and so soft and yielding to the feet that they seemed to have become one with the earth. The stumps and far-reaching roots of the trees that had been cut or broken off above ground, instead of having been uprooted bodily, had also become gardens of many delicate woodland growths. Some of these decaying stumps and outspreading roots were thickly clothed with the clover-like leaflets of the wood-sorrel, here and there nestling among them a pink-veined blossom. On others I found side by side gleaming wild strawberries and dwarf raspberries, feathery fronds of Maidenhair, tall Osmundas, the Crested and the Spinulose Shield Ferns, the leaves of the violet, foam-flower, mitrewort, and many others of the smaller, wood-loving plants. Among these stumps were pools of water filled with the dark, polished, rounded leaves of the wild calla, and bordered by beds of moss which cushioned the equally shining but long and pointed leaves of the Clintonia. Near one of these pools grew a patch of delicate, low-spreading plants, evidently ferns. It needed only one searching look at the broad, triangular, light-green fronds—suggesting somewhat those of a small Brake—with roundish fruit-dots below to assure me that I had found the Oak Fern.