Acrostichum angustatum Schrad.

Rhizome creeping, 4-7 mm in diameter; rhizome scales dark chestnut brown, ovate-lanceolate in outline, 3-5 mm, margins entire with filamentous outgrowths. Fronds spaced 1-15 mm apart, dimorphic, simple, thickly coracious. Sterile fronds: stipe 4-23 cm long, straw coloured, articulated near the base, subglabrous when young with a few, dark lanceolate scales, glabrous at maturity; lamina 14-27 x 3-5 cm, elliptic in outline, sometimes somewhat obovate, apex pointed to sharply rounded, base wedge-shaped and tapering into a narrow wing for a short distance, subglabrous on both surfaces with a few minute, substellate scales on the upper surface and near the midrib below, margin entire. Fertile fronds: stipe 11-29 cm long; lamina smaller and narrower than the sterile lamina, 8-17 x 1.2-2.2 cm, narrowly oblanceolate in outline, base narrowly wedge-shaped, apex subacute to rounded, margins curved. Sporangia covering the whole of the undersurface, but not reaching quite to the midrib.

angustatum: narrowed, a reference to the shape of the frond, applicable but not very distinctive in this genus of narrow leaved ferns.

Wet rock faces and boulders in forest, on trees in temperate coastal forest, on mossy earth banks near streams in mountain ravines.

Africa, Madagascar.

South Africa.

Epiphytic, lithophytic, terrestrial.