Adder's-tongue

It's wonderful in early May each year to stumble across Adder's-tongue, Ophioglossum vulgatum, in old meadows. At the nature reserve, even though I know well the three areas where it keeps going, it is still exciting to find it each year because it is small and mysterious and exotic. It is really a fern, not a flowering plant, as the spike you see here, sheltered by the single leaf, produces spores from the horizontal slots as it matures. The one I've photographed here is from a colony which often produces plants with forked spikes later in the summer and I like to think this may have helped to give it its common name.