Common Moonwort Botrychium lunaria
Common Moonwort is a perennial fern native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. It grows to 1 ft in full sun – part shade.
More about this plant
Botrychium lunaria is a species of fern in the family Ophioglossaceae known by the common name moonwort or common moonwort. It is the most widely distributed moonwort, growing throughout the Northern Hemisphere across Eurasia and from Alaska to Greenland, as well as temperate parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.8–7.2
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 1 ft
- Spacing
- 3–5 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Slow
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Propagate by
- Bare root, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →Wildlife & visitors 53 birds
Open records of who else uses Common Moonwort — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 53 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Botrychium →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (31) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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