Silver Fern (Alsophila dealbata)
NATIVE RANGE:
New Zealand
DESCRIPTION:
Medium sized tree fern with characteristic powdery white-silver leaves. It grows to approximately 40 feet (12 meters) tall with a dense canopy of large fronds.
KORU (FIDDLEHEADS):
The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, and koru is their word for the unfurling coil of a silver fern frond. The fern leaf is all over New Zealand, in tattoos, sport’s logos, milk & other agricultural products, and even on the side of Air New Zealand planes.
It is meant to symbolize both perpetual movement and centering. The frond unfurls, moves up from a tight coil to a taller and taller frond that expands. While simultaneously, the center of the coil is meant to represent returning to the point of origin, remaining centered.
Ferns are unique in the plant world, they were some of the first plants to make it out of the water onto land, some 400 million year ago. They do not reproduce by seeds or flowers but by spores. These tiny spores are the brown dots on the underside of the leaf, they develop into the alternate generation of the fern, not what we recognize as a plant that looks like a fern, but the fern in its gametophytic phase. From this alternate phase a new generation of what we recognize as ferns are born. To read more about how ferns reproduce check out this page on The Fern Life Cycle.
