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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
entry from field notes dated April 16, 2022, taken in disturbed/reforesting borderline cloudforest within 1km of Valle de los Fantasmas, elevation ±2,320m (7600 ft), with limestone bedrock; about 40kms (24 miles), straight-line, ESE of San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí state, MÉXICO, (N22.06°, W100.62°)
ADIANTUM AMPLUM
On a steep outcrop of limestone along the walls of a shallow sinkhole, a maidenhair fern seemed different to others I've seen. That's it above. The leaflets, or pinnules, had oddly turned-under lobes, as shown below:
Maidenhairs, genus Adiantum, shelter their spore-producing sporangia beneath curled-under pinnule margins, but this one was doing it in an unusual way.
It turned out that this was a somewhat uncommonly encountered plant, ADIANTUM AMPLUM. In the Flora del Bajío of upland central Mexico, it's proposed that the species be categorized as in danger of extinction in the Bajío area, a region on the southern boundary of our San Luis Potosí state.
Distributed from northern Mexico to Ecuador, the fern bears no English name, though in Spanish its called Culandrillo, the general name for maidenhair fern species. The online Atlas de las Plantas de la Medicina Tradicional Mexicana reports that in traditional medicine it's used for espanto, which literally means "fear," but in the Spanish-speaking world often is considered a problem more in the spiritual domain, maybe allied to the northern concepts of overwhelming, unfocused anxiety or feelings of guilt.
Another use is to relieve gynecological conditions such as vaginal infections, the regulation and control of menstrual cycles, to bring about abortion, and to treat vaginal bleeding. In the latter case, an infusion is prepared with the whole plant and drunk.