Cystópteris Bulbífera. Fìlix Bulbífera
Fronds lanceolate, elongated, one to three feet long, twice pinnate. Pinnæ lanceolate-oblong, pointed, horizontal, the lowest pair longest. Rachis and pinnæ often bearing bulblets beneath. Pinnules toothed or deeply lobed. Indusium short, truncate on the free side. Stipe short.
One of the most graceful and attractive of our native ferns; an object of beauty, whether standing alone or massed with other growths. It is very easily cultivated and one of the best for draping. “We may drape our homes by the yard,” says Woolson, “with the most graceful and filmy of our common ferns, the bladder fern.” This fern and the maidenhair were introduced into Europe in 1628 by John Tradescant, the first from America.
It delights in shaded ravines and dripping hillsides in limestone districts. While producing spores freely it seems to propagate its species mainly by bulblets, which, falling into a moist soil, at once send out a pair of growing roots, while a tiny frond starts to uncoil from the heart of the bulb. Mt. Toby, Mass., Willoughby Mountain, Vt., calcareous regions in Maine, and west of the Connecticut River, Newfoundland to Manitoba, Wisconsin and Iowa; south to northern Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas.