Ferns
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40 free Ferns trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ferns were unfurling their fronds long before the first flower opened, and they still do things no other plants do. They travel as dust, come back from the dead, climb, float, and now and then set a world record. People have built legends, fashions and a whole collecting craze around them. This quiz gathers the best fern fun facts in one place: how a fern makes more ferns without a single seed, what a fiddlehead is and which ones end up on a dinner plate, the giants, the floaters and the houseplant favourites, and the odd corners of history and folklore where ferns turn up. It is pitched for curious gardeners, hikers, students and anyone who enjoys a good plant fact. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing more than you arrived with.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The silver fern, a tree fern whose fronds are white underneath, is a national symbol of which country?
New Zealand
New Zealand's Māori stories tell of hunters laying the fronds pale side up, so the undersides caught the moonlight and marked the way home.
Q 02Old European folklore held that carrying the dust-like 'seed' of a fern gave a person which power?
Invisibility
Invisibility made a kind of sense: nobody could find a fern's seed, so the seed had to be unseen and able to pass that on. Thieves in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 joke about it.
Q 03Ferns reproduce with spores instead of seeds, a habit they share with which other group of plants?
Mosses
Mosses also spread by spores, but ferns are vascular plants, with internal veins that carry water and let some of them grow as tall as trees.
Q 04The resurrection fern, which carpets oak limbs in the American South, is named for surviving what?
Long droughts
Long droughts curl it into a grey-brown husk that has lost up to 97 percent of its water, yet a day or two after rain it is green again.
Q 05For more than a thousand years, Asian farmers have floated the tiny fern Azolla on flooded fields of which crop?
Rice
Rice gets free fertilizer from Azolla, which shelters bacteria in its leaves that pull nitrogen straight out of the air.
Q 06Which ancient tree is nicknamed the maidenhair tree because its leaves resemble a maidenhair fern's?
Ginkgo
Ginkgo leaves fan out like the leaflets of a maidenhair fern, but the tree is a seed plant, the last living species of an order 290 million years old.
Q 07Which fern, a toxic weed of moors and hillsides, grows on every continent except Antarctica?
Bracken
Bracken's name probably comes from an old Scandinavian word for fern, and its fronds carry a carcinogen that can pass into the milk of cows that graze on it.
Q 08The coiled tip of a young fern frond, a fiddlehead, is also called a crozier after whose hooked staff?
A bishop's
A bishop's crozier curls over at the top just like the frond, while the name fiddlehead comes from the scroll at the end of a violin.
Q 09Which British sandwich biscuit is still stamped with a swirling fern pattern from a 19th-century craze?
Custard cream
Custard cream biscuits wear baroque fern fronds whoever bakes them, a design that outlived the fashion for ferns by more than a century.
Q 10Wardian cases, glass boxes built to keep ferns alive in smoggy London, later took which crop from China to India?
Tea
Tea plants, about 20,000 of them, were smuggled out of Shanghai in the 1840s by Robert Fortune in the cases, which were the forerunners of the terrarium.
Q 11Slavic and Baltic legend says a magical fern flower blooms for a single night on the eve of which festival?
Midsummer
Midsummer is the night to hunt for it: the bloom is said to bring riches to its finder, though evil spirits guard it. Real ferns never flower at all.
Q 12Tree ferns can stand 20 metres tall, yet their trunks completely lack which tissue found in true trees?
Wood
Wood is absent: the trunk is an upright stem strengthened by a thick, interlocking mat of its own tiny roots.
Q 13Which plants, gritty with silica and once used to scour cooking pots, are now classified among the ferns?
Horsetails
Horsetails look nothing like ferns, with hollow, jointed stems and no fronds, but genetic studies placed them inside the fern family tree.
Q 21The Barnsley fern, a computer-drawn shape modelled on the black spleenwort, is a well-known what in mathematics?
A fractal
A fractal repeats its own shape at every scale, and this one grows a lifelike frond from just four simple transformations applied over and over.
Q 22Which restaurant chain began as one of the first 'fern bars', the plant-filled singles spots of 1970s America?
TGI Fridays
TGI Fridays opened on Manhattan's Upper East Side, home to many young single adults, and fern bars went on to pair hanging greenery with Tiffany-style lamps.
Q 23Fiddleheads sold as a spring vegetable in northeastern North America come from a fern named after which bird?
Ostrich
Q 14A 'fern spike' in the fossil record marks ferns briefly taking over the land after which kind of event?
A mass extinction
A mass extinction leaves bare ground that wind-blown fern spores reach first; the best-known spike follows the impact that ended the age of dinosaurs.
Q 15A fern spore first grows into a tiny separate plant called a prothallus, which typically has what shape?
A heart
A heart just a few millimetres wide is what sprouts from a spore, and it lives on its own before a familiar leafy fern grows out of it.
Q 16Why do ferns, unlike seed plants, need a film of water on the ground in order to reproduce?
Their sperm must swim
Their sperm must swim: each one has whip-like tails and crosses a film of rain or dew to reach an egg on the tiny plant that grew from a spore.
Q 17The fork fern Tmesipteris oblanceolata was reported in 2024 to have the largest known what of any organism?
Genome
Genome size is its record: about 160 billion base pairs of DNA, more than 50 times the human total, packed into a plant under a foot long.
Q 18Which houseplant, often sold alongside ferns, is really a flowering plant that produces berries and seeds?
Asparagus fern
Asparagus fern belongs to the asparagus family and comes from southern Africa: its feathery 'leaves' are really tiny modified stems, and its berries are toxic to pets.
Q 19The Chinese brake fern is planted to clean polluted soil because it soaks up huge amounts of which poison?
Arsenic
Arsenic is drawn out of the ground and held inside the plant in huge amounts, which turns a pretty garden fern into a tool for phytoremediation, cleaning soil with living plants.
Q 20Vast blooms of the floating fern Azolla may have tipped Earth toward its ice ages after covering which ocean?
The Arctic
The Arctic was then a warm, almost enclosed sea; ferns that died and sank over some 800,000 years are thought to have buried enough carbon to help chill the planet.
Ostrich ferns have tall fronds shaped like the bird's plumes, and their fiddleheads are a delicacy that should be cooked, never eaten raw.
Q 24The water fern Marsilea looks so unlike a fern that it is easily mistaken for which lucky plant?
Clover
Clover it is not, though every leaf has four lobes: one Australian species, nardoo, was ground into flour by the explorers Burke and Wills, whose deaths are blamed partly on preparing it wrongly.
Q 25The adder's-tongue fern Ophioglossum reticulatum holds the record among plants for the most what in each cell?
Chromosomes
Chromosomes run to many hundreds in each of its cells, against a human's 46, because the plant has copied its whole set several times over.
Q 26Staghorn ferns, named for their antler-shaped fronds, naturally grow anchored to what?
Tree trunks
Tree trunks hold them high in the forest: shield-shaped fronds clamp to the bark and protect the roots, while the 'antlers' hang free and carry the spores.
Q 27The Christmas fern of eastern North America is named for what its fronds do in late December?
Stay green
Stay green is the whole trick: the plant is an evergreen, so its fronds are often still fresh at Christmas when the woods around them are bare.
Q 28Swamp forests of ferns and their giant relatives, buried around 300 million years ago, slowly became what?
Coal
Coal is the squeezed remains of those forests, and their era's name says so: Carboniferous means coal-bearing in Latin.
Q 29The sensitive fern of North American wetlands is named because its fronds die at the first touch of what?
Frost
Frost kills the fronds almost overnight in autumn, while a brush from a hand does nothing, unlike the folding leaves of the mimosa called the sensitive plant.
Q 30North America's walking fern 'walks' across damp rocks by doing what with its long, tapering fronds?
Rooting at the tips
Rooting at the tips starts a new plantlet wherever a frond arches over and touches down, so a colony creeps forward one frond-length at a time.