Bracken
Pteridium aquilinum
Family · Dennstaedtiaceae · Poisonous
Read this before the sheet
This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
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The fern that covers whole slopes in the north and centre and dies back entirely in winter, leaving the hillside rust-coloured. It indicates deep acid soil and farmland abandonment.
Uplands · Oak woods · Scrubland · Pine woods
Also known aseagle fern, brake
How to tell it
A large triangular frond, three times divided, on a single stalk straight out of the ground, with no crown. It does not form a rosette like other ferns: it comes up spaced out, in thousands.
What it is confused with
Royal fern
Osmunda regalis
Royal fern grows in a big crown beside water with broad rounded leaflets; bracken comes up spaced out on dry hillsides with a finely divided triangular frond.
Open sheet →What it is for
Livestock bedding and barn thatch throughout the mountains, and one of the best manures there was. A note that stays on the sheet: it contains ptaquiloside, a proven carcinogen, so it is not eaten nor fed continuously to livestock, unlike what was done in several regions.