The centipede fern’s frond looks like a green centipede standing up: along both sides of the rachis, slender pinnae crowd in rows, each one spread—when the wind blows, the whole centipede moves.

A Green Centipede Standing Up

The centipede fern’s frond looks like a green centipede standing up: along both sides of the rachis, slender pinnae crowd in rows, each one spread, and when the wind blows the whole centipede stirs.

It tolerates drought, poor soil, and strong light, holding itself in wall cracks, on limestone, and in roadside stone gaps—a rare sun-loving member of the ferns.

— Botany Notes, self-inscription —

A hundred feet without a sideways green axis—

it insists on standing as a clump from the cracks of stone.

The Fern That Can Absorb Poison

It is a famous arsenic hyperaccumulator—able to take up large amounts of arsenic from soil and store it in its pinnae. In the phytoremediation research of contaminated soils, it has become quite a name.

The way to use it is plain: plant centipede fern on the polluted ground, let it grow, then harvest plant and roots together and carry them away—and the arsenic in the soil is that much less. A roadside fern can do hard labor for the land.

A Temper for Stone Cracks

It loves calcium and grows on lime-rich substrates—limestone and old wall cracks; the rhizome is short and creeping, clumps pressing flat against the stone face, surviving on the barest soil.

For exactly this reason it is one of the most carefree greens for garden rockeries, wall bases, and stone-step cracks: no daily watering and fussing—a clump of green simply stands on its own.

• How to know it: Perennial fern; fronds once-pinnate; pinnae linear-lanceolate, densely set like centipede feet; linear sori along the pinna margins.
• Season: Evergreen year-round; new fronds in spring and summer; sori mature in summer and autumn, a brown line along the leaf margins.
• Caution: As an arsenic hyperaccumulator it concentrates heavy metals—never eat it or use it as medicine, to avoid taking in harmful substances.

Where It Is Used

Besides soil remediation, it serves as greenery and potted foliage for damp shade, and the whole plant also enters folk medicine for clearing heat and draining dampness—under a Chinese physician’s guidance.

Unlike ferns that will stay only under the forest canopy, give it a little crack and a little light and it grows into a green centipede. A plant’s capacity for hardship usually shows on its body.

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Keywords: centipede fern · soil remediation · rock-dwelling · fern