Small, slender ferns with linear or thready leaves, the sterile, one to
two inches high and tortuous or "curled like corkscrews"; fertile fronds
longer, three to five inches, and bearing at the top about five pairs of
minute, fruited pinnæ. Sporangia large, ovoid, sessile in a double row
along the single vein of the narrow divisions of the fertile leaves, and
provided with a complete apical ring. (_Schizæa_, from a Greek root meaning
to split, alluding to the cleft leaves of foreign species.)
[Illustration: Curly Grass. _Schizæa pusilla_]
The curly grass is so minute that it is difficult to distinguish it when
growing amid its companion plants, the grasses, mosses, sundews, club
mosses, etc. The sterile leaves are evergreen. Pine barrens of New Jersey,
Grand Lake, Nova Scotia, and in New Brunswick. Several new stations for the
curly grass have recently been discovered in the southwest counties of Nova
Scotia by the Gray Herbarium expedition, mostly in bogs and hollows of
sandy peat or sphagnum.
[Illustration: Sporangia of Curly Grass]