Colors

Data mode

Account

Login
Sign up

Collapse this

Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:
Copy permalink to share

Anchistea C. Presl. Virginia Chain Fern.

A monotypic genus, perennial herb, of e. North America. Anchistea has often been lumped into the Eurasian (mainly e. Asian) Woodwardia, but is basal to Woodwardia, morphologically distinctive from both Woodwardia and Lorinseria, and an ancient independent lineage (Gasper et al. 2016, 2017).

ID notes: Sterile plants of Osmundastrum cinnamomeum are sometimes confused with Anchistea virginica, which also has rather coarse, pinnate-pinnatifid leaves and grows in similar wet, acid places. Osmundastrum is coarser (to 2 m tall, vs. to 1 m tall), has cinnamon tufts of tomentum present in the axils of the pinnae (vs. absent), has the rachis greenish and rather fleshy in texture (vs. brown and wiry), and bears fronds clumped or tufted from a massive, woody, ascending rhizome covered with old petiole bases (vs. fronds borne scattered along a thick, horizontal, creeping rhizome).

Ref: Cranfill (1993b) In Flora of North America Editorial Committee (1993b); Cranfill & Kato (2003); Gasper et al. (2016); Gasper et al. (2017); Kramer, Chambers, & Hennipman In Kramer & Green (1990); Li et al. (2016b); PPG I (2016). Show full citations.

Show in key(s)

Show parent family

Show species in Anchistea

Your browser does not support SVGs

Hover over a shape, letter, icon, or arrow on the map for definition or see the legend. Data for arrows not developed for genera and families which may have species only occurring outside the flora area.

image of plant© Alan M. Cressler | Anchistea virginica | Original Image ⭷
image of plant© Alan M. Cressler | Anchistea virginica | Original Image ⭷

Feedback

See something wrong or missing on about Anchistea? Let us know here: (Please include your name and email if at all complicated so we can clarify if needed.) We greatly appreciate feedback, and will include updates from you in our next webapp update, which can take a few months.


back to original search ↑ | show next »