English: Ostrich fern; Fiddlehead fern; Shuttlecock fern.
Name: struthiopteris comes from Ancient Greek strouthíōn meaning ostrich and pterís fern.
Japanese: Kogomi.
Genus: 1 species.
Region: Northern Hemisphere, central and northern Europe, northern Asia, eastern and northern North America.
Habitat temperate; favoring riverbanks, sandbars; resistant to floods; prefers protection from wind and hail.
Use: popular ornamental; tightly wound immature fronds, fiddleheads, as a cooked vegetable; inadvisable to eat uncooked fiddleheads; sprouts are a delicacy in Japan.
Ecology: as food by the larvae of some
Lepidoptera species including Sthenopis pretiosus.
BotanyFern; large; crown-forming; forming dense colonies; grows from a completely vertical crown, sends out lateral stolons to form new crowns.
Leaves: dimorphic; deciduous, green, sterile are almost vertical, 100 to 170 cm tall, 20 to 35 cm broad, long-tapering to the base, short-tapering to the tip, resembling ostrich plumes; fertile fronds are shorter, 40 to 65 cm long, brown when ripe, with highly modified and constricted leaf tissue, curled over the sporangia; develop in autumn, release the spores in early spring.
TaxonomyMatteuccia is more closely related to Onocleopsis and Onoclea than to Matteuccia orientalis and Matteuccia intermedia.