The large ferns of shade and leaf litter, where the name is usually a description of the plant in Greek.
The ground
In deep shade a fern can afford to be big, and these three are. Dryopteris throws up a coarse shuttlecock of fronds in oak and beech woods. Polypodium runs a creeping rhizome along banks, walls and the mossy limbs of trees. Matteuccia sends its fronds up in a tight vase from a running stock and is the ostrich fern of damp riverside woodland.
The names
dry-OP-ter-iss
Dryopteris filix-mas
The buckler ferns and shield ferns, the coarse shuttlecocks of British and European woodland. Every syllable after the first is unstressed, and that is where the spelling comes apart.
6 recorded spellings
pol-ee-POH-dee-um
Polypodium vulgare
Common polypody, the fern of walls, banks and mossy branches. Five syllables with the stress in the middle, and the two on either side of it collapse.
12 recorded spellings
ma-TEW-see-uh
Matteuccia struthiopteris
The ostrich fern. A commemorative name with two doubled consonants and a diphthong, which is three separate opportunities to write it down wrong.
8 recorded spellings
Worth noting
Two of these names are built from a Greek word for fern, pteris, which comes in turn from pteron, a feather or a wing. Once you can see pteris inside a name you stop misspelling the second half of it.
Elsewhere