More compound frond of Purple Cliff Brake
Sterile frond
Growing from the broken rocks in among the Purple Cliff Brake were thrifty little tufts of the Maidenhair Spleenwort. This tiny plant seemed to have forgotten its shyness and to have forsworn its love for moist, shaded, mossy rocks. It ventured boldly out upon these barren cliffs, exposing itself to the fierce glare of the sun and to every blast of wind, and holding itself upright with a saucy self-assurance that seemed strangely at variance with its nature.
Near by a single patch of the Walking Leaf climbed up the face of the cliff while, perhaps strangest of all, from the decaying trunk of a tree, which lay prostrate among the rocks, sprang a single small but perfect plant of the Ebony Spleenwort, a fern which was a complete stranger in this locality, so far as I could learn.
17. CHRISTMAS FERN
Aspidium acrostichoides (Dryopteris acrostichoides)
New Brunswick to Florida, in rocky woods. One to two and a half feet high, with very chaffy stalks.
Fronds.—Lance-shaped, once-pinnate, fertile fronds contracted toward the summit; pinnæ narrowly lance-shaped, half halberd-shaped at the slightly stalked base, bristly-toothed, the upper ones on the fertile fronds contracted and smaller; fruit-dots round, close, confluent with age, nearly covering the under surface of the fertile pinnæ; indusium orbicular, fixed by the depressed centre.