Flora Focus: Bracken

When I'm out running this plant is one of my least favourite. When it's dead and dying back the stems are sharp, catching your shoes, tripping you up and scratching your legs. It does the same when it's in full bloom - only then it does a marvellous job at hiding holes and dips in the ground. It can be high enough to need parting with arms to work your way through it!! One book I own suggests it grows from 20-200cm high (see photo below) (book: Wildflower and where to find them in Northern England: Acid Uplands, by Laurie Fallows). That's one tall plant which makes progress through large swathes of it really slow, for me at least. I know other runners think the same. However, to look at from a distance it's beautiful, filling whole hillsides with glorious green swaying plants.

Bracken (also known as Brake Fern) is part of the dry acidic soil loving fern family, commonly found on woodland floors and covering hillsides. This plant doesn't produce any fruits but when the fronds are young (and called fiddleheads at that stage) they are sometimes eaten. Do not however take this as an invitation to go and grab some for your next salad as some types are thought to be carcinogenic (ie poisonous). The British Royal Horticultural Society don't recommend you eat this plant at all as there are links to cancer of the stomach and oesophagus.

The plant grows from underground rhizomes (a plant root, just like root ginger) which has, or has had various uses. In some countries it's ground to make a flour-like powder for making bread. The rhizomes and fronds have been used to brew beer, and the starch from the rhizomes has been known as a substitute for arrowroot. In Japan, the starch is used to make a jelly like sweet called warabimochi. Other countries (Korea, China, Taiwan and Japan) eat the fronds as a vegetable. More traditional uses include the plant being used for animal bedding, as a fertiliser and for garden mulch - it's actually harvested in the Lake District to make compost (here's one website I found on this).

As with most plants, animals make various use of bracken. Insects live on or eat the plant, and more importantly for us humans, ticks from sheep or deer use the plant as a waiting spot - ready for someone (or another animal) to brush against it and enable them to latch on to a host so they can feed!

Really tall bracken!!

A carpet of bracken under the trees on Shire Hill, Glossop