What Are Polypodium Ferns?

Hello! My name is Reggie Whitehead. Today I am going to be speaking with you about growing tropical ferns courtesy of the Tropical Fern Exotic Plant Society and on behalf of expertvillage.com. Another group of ferns I would like to grow down here in South Florida are Polypodium type ferns. Polypodium's are a rather a large group of ferns. I guess we should really talk a little about fern biology, fern mythology but we will get back to that in a little while. This is a Polypodium and this is actually growing in a basket. The wildest plant would not be growing in a basket it would be growing on a tree. It is a apaphite and that apathite ferns are. Ferns by large are not grown from seed or have flowers nor do they have fruit. They are grown from spores. Now if you will look at this Polypodium over here, one would think that it is sprouting a flower. No, this happens to be a impatience seed that got lodged in here and continued to grow. It liked the substraight that the fern was growing and therefore it nested to grow in there. This is a fine example of what polypodiums are.