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Osmundastrum cinnamomeum
Also called Buckhorn
Cinnamon fern is a large native royal fern that forms big clonal colonies in wet, swampy ground. It grows best in consistently moist, acidic soil and is the sole living member of its genus.
Osmundastrum cinnamomeum, commonly known as the cinnamon fern or the buckhorn fern, is a species of royal fern native to the Americas and Asia. It is the sole living representative of the genus Osmundastrum, which was separated from Osmunda after modern phylogenetic studies demonstrated that Osmunda was not monophyletic. In North America it occurs from southern Labrador west to Ontario, and south through the eastern United States to eastern Mexico and the West Indies; in South America it occurs west to Peru and south to Paraguay. In Asia it occurs from southeastern Siberia south through Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan to India, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
Osmundastrum cinnamomeum has a fossil record extending into the Late Cretaceous of North America, approximately 73 million years ago, making it one of the oldest living plant species. The genus itself goes back to the Triassic.
The range of the cinnamon fern spans both the Old World and the New World, yet it is notably absent from western North America, despite the modern species having evolved there. This distribution makes the cinnamon fern a classic example of the eastern Asian–eastern North American disjunction, a biogeographic pattern in which plant lineages that once had widespread ranges in past geological periods become restricted to the eastern regions of North America and eastern Asia over time. Evidence shows that it continued to persist in Western North America up until the Neogene.
Cinnamon fern has been historically used by the Abenaki and Menominee as a food source. The Iroquois and Cherokee tribes used the fern for a wide variety of medicinal purposes including as a cold remedy, gynecological aid, venereal aid, and as a remedy to snake bites.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Osmundastrum cinnamomeum by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
