royal fern

The royal fern has large, rounded leaflets with spores clustered like dried seed heads at the ends of their fronds.

You associate some of the lower plantings with moist soil — the royal fern, turtlehead and creeping phlox, for example — but others you’d think would run a mile from flood.

Everyone in the city knew it, from bus stops and benches and lawn signs; it was as common in New Orleans as live oak or royal fern.

She came to rest on a royal fern.

Though it dates from the early Jurassic, it is in essence similar to its modern relatives, the royal ferns, which might thus reasonably be described as living fossils.