Australian ferns & fern allies Australian National Botanic Gardens Australian National Herbarium

Oleandra Cav.

Epiphytic, subepiphytic or terrestrial ferns, shrub-like, or +/- climbing or scandent. Rhizome long-creeping, branching, stiff and erect, sometimes pendulous, or thin and wiry, bearing close, mostly imbricate, brown, non-clathrate, peltate scales, with attenuate mostly deciduous apices, radially symmetric, dictyostelic, eah vascular bundle surrounded by a medulla and cortex. Fronds short- or long-stipitate, the stipes articulate or short or long phyllopodia, +/- evenly spaced in climbing species, in loose, +/- spaces whorls in the bushy species, fibrovascular bundles 3, arranged in a shallow a "V", the 2 adaxial bundles larger, the lamina simple, entire, lanceolate or elongate-allipitic, costate, chartaceous, glabrous or pubescent with multiseptate hairs, costa often abaxially peleate, veins prominent, free, simple or forked, terminating in the cartilaginous margin, often with a +/-conspicuous submarginal hydathode; fronds usually uniform, sometimes ddimorphic with the fertile fronds contracted and linear. Sporangia borne in snall, discrete, round sori, in a single row either side of and usually close to the costs, superficial on the acroscopic branch of a vein, indusium +/- round reinform, persistent or rarely fugaceous, paraphyses absent, pedicel long, 3-seriate, annulus longitudinal, interrupted of 12 or 14 thickened cells. Spores monolete, +/- smooth, or irregularly tuberculate rugose, translucent.

Species in Papuasia