Ostrich fern grows in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, across central and northern Europe, northern Asia and northern North America. It prefers moist, shaded ground and its stolons let colonies hold up to spring flooding on riverbanks. Some Lepidoptera larvae feed on it.
The genus honours the Italian neurophysiologist Carlo Matteucci, and struthiopteris combines the Greek words for ostrich and fern, for the feathery sterile fronds. The fiddleheads are a delicacy in northeastern North America, known in Quebec as têtes de violon, and must be cooked rather than eaten raw. The Greenbelt Indigenous Botanical Survey notes the fiddleheads were harvested at Six Nations of the Grand River as early as 1912.