#polypody fern

Three identification photos of Polypody fern (Polypodium virginianum) growing between boulders on a forested lakeshore. Polypodys are my favourite fern species! Yes I am a fern nerd if you couldn’t tell from our business name! Polypody virginianum, Polypody glycyrrhiza, and Polypodium vulgare are edible and medicinal ferns, but you don’t eat the tiny fiddleheads, you eat the rhizomes (roots, sort of). The rhizomes are sweet and throat-soothing, tasting of licorice. All over the world this little fern family has been used by Europeans and First Nations as medicine to treat colds, flus, lung congestion, sore throats, and diarrhea. It was also an alternative to candy where there wasn’t any.

The species that has angel’s singing around it is Polypodium glycyrrhiza or “licorice fern” from the Pacific Northwest. It is the sweetest of them all and tastes the most strongly like actual licorice root. The rhizome can be chewed fresh, picked out of the moss of big leaf maple trees. Drying truly enhances it though and then it is an amazing flavour for liqueurs, mead, candy, desserts, and herbal medicines. Add it to cough syrups, immune system boosting tinctures, medicinal mushroom extracts, and herbal tea blends.