A tiny, highly endangered arctic-alpine fern named for the rusty-brown, woolly-haired underside of its fronds, the Rusty Woodsia hates competition and only grows on high, exposed rock crevices and scree, adding to its rarity. A victim of the Victorian fern craze, or Pteridomania, where an obsession with collecting ferns swept through Victorian Britain, the Rusty Woodsia only managed to survive in the wild out of the reach of plant hunters' fingers and grazing animals. What started as a fashionable hobby for the society elite transformed into a nationwide obsession that spread across classes and genders, leaving, to this day, a fundamental alteration to rural British landscapes.
For the Rusty Woodsia, sexual reproduction is also rare, meaning that conservationists must rely on vegetative propagation (a type of asexual plant reproduction where new, genetically identical offspring grow from parts of a parent plant without the use of seeds). Find out about the work organisations like RBGE are doing to bolster the wild population via the link below!
Resurrecting the Fern; Looking Back At Our Woodsia Translocations – Botanics Stories
