Moonwort
Common Moonwort. Photo copyright Dean Wm. Taylor
DB: This is Earth and Sky, on a kind of fern called a moonwort.
JB: You’re more likely to have heard of moonwort than to have seen it. Stories and legends suggest this plant can raise the dead, open locks and unshoe horses that tread on it. The stories might be fiction, but moonwort is very real. You can find it in every state of the U.S. and all over the world.
DB: Finding moonwort isn’t easy, though. You have to get down on your hands and knees on a forest floor, meadow or weedy field. Moonworts are tiny – just one green leaf with a few pairs of leaflets. And only a small percentage of moonworts rise above the soil or leaf litter every year. The plants that stay below are extremely pale, even albino. Unlike most plants, they don’t get their energy through photosynthesis.
JB: Instead, during the underground phase of a moonwort’s life, the plant is dependent on mycorrhizal fungi for water, minerals and sugars. It’s this fungal partnership that lets moonwort stay underground and dormant for several years. Though new moonwort species are still being discovered, some varieties have become rare. For more about moonworts – how to protect them and where to find them – come to today’s show at earthsky.org.
DB: Special thanks today to the U.S. Forest Service and to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation – supporting the conservation of native fish, wildlife, plants and their habitats. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
MORE INFO
Our thanks to the following individuals and institutions who assisted in the preparation of this script:
Monique Reed Herbarium Botanist Texas A&M University College Station, TX monique@mail.bio.tamu.edu
Steven Spickerman West Zone Plant Ecologist Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest sspickerman@fs.fed.us (715) 264-2511
The following books, articles and web sites were used in preparing this script:
Botrychium lunaria (The Swanson Party BWCA Home Page)
Moonwort Madness (Gustavus Adolphus College)
PLANTS National Database (US Dept of Agriculture)
“ “Virginia Grape Fern– Rattlesnake Fern (BorealForest.org)
Flora of North America Project&: You can read a description of the genus and link to a page which will have a drawing and a range map. (Harvard University)
Author’s Notes:
Some moonwort “hot-spots”: Oregon’s Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, Glacier National Park, the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, the Superior National Forest, and Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.
Moonworts is the common name for Botrychium lunaria, named for the pinnae which have a lunar-crescent shape in one species. Not all moonwoorts have crescent-shaped pinnae. The shapes of the pinnae are extremely variable and often make identification of species very difficult.
European peasants believed that its leaves always faced the moon – they don’t.
Slender moonwort, a federal candidate species, has been collected at elevations ranging from sea level in Canada to over 10,000 feet in Colorado, yet only 200 plants are known to exist. Moonworts, members of the genus Botrychium in the Adder’s-tongue family, are unique ferns that may be no larger than your thumb.
