The intriguing stories behind one of NZ’s most common plants

In Book Takes, authors share three things that readers will gain from their books as well as giving an insight into what they learnt during the researching and writing. This weekend, Leon Perrie talks about the Identification Guide to the Ferns and Lycophytes of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Ferns are one of New Zealand’s natural icons, with the silver fern emblem recognisable around the world. Te Papa botanists Patrick Brownsey and Leon Perrie have some six decades of combined experience studying the diversity and classification of New Zealand’s ferns.

Between 2012 and 2022, they completed the Ferns and Lycophytes series for the Flora of New Zealand.

“We wanted to complement that definitive but technical account with a guide accessible to beginners,” says Perrie. “When I’m learning a new group of plants, I like to have lots of pictures alongside a few, easily understood words to guide me as to what features I should be looking at – that’s the book we’ve made for ferns in Aotearoa.”

Unfortunately, Brownsey died during the preparation of the book, but it rests on the legacy he left. Here’s what Perrie thinks readers will learn from the Identification Guide.

The numbers of ferns in New Zealand may be a surprise

New Zealand is home to 204 indigenous species of ferns and lycophytes (an allied group of plants). That’s about 8% of the indigenous vascular flora, and it makes ferns a good group of plants to learn – small enough to be manageable, but big enough to be challenging and rewarding. The book covers 201 of the ferns and lycophytes most encountered in New Zealand, both native and exotic.

That might seem a lot of ferns, but smaller landmasses like Fiji and Solomon Islands have even more indigenous species. New Zealand’s cultural connection with ferns comes much more from their prominence in our environments.

Recognising ferns relies on a few key characteristics