linguistic:paraphrasing
Sporophyte

Extant ferns are herbaceous perennials and most lack woody growth. When woody growth is present, it is found in the stem. Their foliage may be deciduous or evergreen, and some are semi-evergreen depending on the climate. Like the sporophytes of seed plants, those of ferns consist of stems, leaves and roots. Ferns differ from spermatophytes in that they reproduce by spores rather than having flowers and producing seeds. However, they also differ from spore-producing bryophytes in that, like seed plants, they are polysporangiophytes, their sporophytes branching and producing many sporangia. Also unlike bryophytes, fern sporophytes are free-living and only briefly dependent on the maternal gametophyte.

The green, photosynthetic part of the plant is technically a megaphyll and in ferns, it is often called a frond. New leaves typically expand by the unrolling of a tight spiral called a crozier or fiddlehead into fronds. This uncurling of the leaf is termed circinate vernation. Leaves are divided into two types: sporophylls and tropophylls. Sporophylls produce spores; tropophylls do not. Fern spores are borne in sporangia which are usually clustered to form sori. The sporangia may be covered with a protective coating called an indusium. The arrangement of the sporangia is important in classification.

In monomorphic ferns, the fertile and sterile leaves look morphologically the same, and both are able to photosynthesize. In hemidimorphic ferns, just a portion of the fertile leaf is different from the sterile leaves. In dimorphic (holomorphic) ferns, the two types of leaves are morphologically distinct. The fertile leaves are much narrower than the sterile leaves, and may have no green tissue at all, as in the Blechnaceae and Lomariopsidaceae.

The anatomy of fern leaves can be anywhere from simple to highly divided, or even indeterminate (e.g. Gleicheniaceae, Lygodiaceae). The divided forms are pinnate, where the leaf segments are completely separated from one other, or pinnatifid (partially pinnate), where the leaf segments are still partially connected. When the fronds are branched more than once, it can also be a combination of the pinnatifid are pinnate shapes. If the leaf blades are divided twice, the plant has bipinnate fronds, and tripinnate fronds if they branch three times, and all the way to tetra- and pentapinnate fronds. In tree ferns, the main stalk that connects the leaf to the stem (known as the stipe), often has multiple leaflets. The leafy structures that grow from the stipe are known as pinnae and are often again divided into smaller pinnules.

Fern stems are often loosely called rhizomes, even though they grow underground only in some of the species. Epiphytic species and many of the terrestrial ones have above-ground creeping stolons (e.g., Polypodiaceae), and many groups have above-ground erect semi-woody trunks (e.g., Cyatheaceae, the scaly tree ferns). These can reach up to 20 meters (66 ft) tall in a few species (e.g., Cyathea brownii on Norfolk Island and Cyathea medullaris in New Zealand).

Roots are underground non-photosynthetic structures that take up water and nutrients from soil. They are always fibrous and are structurally very similar to the roots of seed plants.