Nature on our doorsteps: Two different Honeysuckle plants

Rosaleen Dwyer is the County Heritage Officer at South Dublin County Council – every week she gives us an insight into nature on our doorsteps and the beautiful biodiversity of its plants and wildlife.

The Adder’s Tongue Fern is a very unusual plant.  Unlike the long feathery fronds of the ferns that are often seen growing in woodlands and along hedgerows and shady riverbanks, the Adder’s Tongue is not so easily spotted.

It is quite small, and so it is often hidden by the grasses and other flowering plants that grow around it.

While it can occur in old meadows and along grassy paths, it is not a common plant. In some locations, however, it can be plentiful in a small area.

It has only one small leaf which is oval shaped with smooth edges.

The distinctive thing about the Adder’s Tongue Fern, however, is that the leaf blade partly surrounds a single upright fertile spike that grows to between only 10-20cm.

It is this yellow-green spike that gives the fern its name.

Ferns are an ancient group of plants. They appeared after the low-growing mosses had developed and before the true flowering plants had evolved.

Honeysuckle has highly scented trumpet-like flowers that attract bumblebees and moths

While prehistoric ferns grew to huge heights and formed great forests, fossil records suggest that the family to which Adder’s Tongue belongs did not produce tall plants even back then.

Being early-evolved plants, ferns do not produce seeds. Instead they produce thousands of dust-like spores in structures on the undersides of their leaves.

These spores disperse in the wind and fall to the ground where they begin the next generation of ferns.

The spores of the Adder’s Tongue, however, are contained in the small, yellow-coloured structures that are lined up on either side along the top half of the fertile green spike.

Human beings have 46 chromosomes in our genes.  Plants contain many more and, interestingly, one of the members of the Adder’s Tongue family of ferns is known to contain the most chromosomes of any living organism on Earth, more than 1,200 chromosomes.

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