THE VARIETT OF PLANT LIFE 



97 



deciduous — the cinnamon, royal, and interrupted ferns — and 

 prefer swampy woods and stream margins. A few colonize tree 

 trunks and boulders, as does the polypody fern. Growing to the 

 greatest height of any native species, the brake fern has a three- 

 parted leaf which often grows to be five or six feet tall. 



Fig. 67. — ^The true ferns are plants with subterranean stems, large and often 

 intricately compound leaves. The cinnamon fern produces special spore-bear- 

 ing leaves in the center of the foliage cluster. 



Another group of the Pteridophyta is the Club-mosses (fig. 

 68) with about 1000 species. These are creeping or erect plants 

 of woods and fields, smaller in size than the True Ferns and with 

 minute scale-like leaves closely overlapping on the stems, resem- 

 bling the leaf-habit of some conifers. Gound-pine is a species 

 which looks like a miniature evergreen tree; creeping-pine and 



