South Asian Asplenium

Family Kostentsovye. Epiphytic plant with large leaves up to 1.5 m long and 20 cm wide (rarely more), gathered into a dense, more or less narrow funnel-shaped rosette.

Rhizome straight, thick, covered with scales and a mass of tangled adventitious roots. The fronds are entire, sometimes irregularly lobed, oblanceolate, with the greatest width in the middle or just above the middle of the blade, rather sharply tapering downward into a very narrow base, leathery, slightly undulate, light green with a dark purple midrib, keeled beneath. Sori linear, elongated, positioned obliquely to the midrib. Native range - Eastern Australia, Polynesia. In house culture it more often appears under the erroneous name A. gnezdovoy - A. nidus L., which refers to another, very close and similar species that is rarely cultivated. The true A. gnezdovoy differs from A. south-Asian by a widely opened rosette of leaves, spreading from the center first almost horizontally and then obliquely upward. The leaves are long, narrowly elongate, with almost parallel margins with a truncate or rounded base, suddenly passing into a short petiole. The central midrib is rounded beneath.