Many of us have shady gardens, or at least have shady places within the garden, and it is here that ferns come into their own. I had a corner that was getting dingier with every passing season as an Acer grew to maturity. Ferns came to the rescue and over a few years I acquired a couple of dozen sorts. Some were fully deciduous, others to varying degrees evergreen. All were given a close haircut in early spring as the first signs of new growth appeared. There’s something animal like in the way that ferns unfurl their new fronds, like a swan raising its head from feeding on the lake bottom. Their fresh foliage expands out and is as much a marker of a new season as trees coming into leaf.
I wonder why it is that a group of primitive plants should have chosen to outdo most of the flowering plants in the complexity of its leaves. Not in every case, either way about, but in general they have divisions, subdivisions, sub-subdivisions to their leaves that create a lacy intricacy that sets them apart. Their geometric symmetry keeps the intricacy from becoming untidy and the result is very pleasing to the eye.
The most delicate looking of the ferns that I grow is Adiantum venustum. It looks identical to the indoor Maidenhair ferns yet is one of the toughest plants I know. It is happiest in moist soil and moderate shade, but will tolerate deep shade and dry conditions. By the end of the winter its foliage is pretty jaded, but if you shear it off you need to do so before the almost invisibly fine new shoots emerge. When I was buying young plants to grow on at the nursery it was never a species offered in liner supplier lists and we propagated it ourselves by division. It doesn’t like disturbance much so reasonable sized chunks taken as growth started in the spring seemed to give us the best results, though never without some losses.
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| Adiantum venustum |
With the finest of foliage, but otherwise looking somewhat like miniaturised bracken, is Paesia scaberula. This has proved less hardy than some and in cold winters it pays to have a backup plant under cover somewhere. It is also relatively intolerant of being too wet or too dry. Get the conditions right and it is capable of quite rapid spread by means of fine surface rhizomes. Mine gets 20-30cm tall.
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| Paesia scaberula |
The Japanese painted fern, Athyrium nipponicum, has a number of forms with pink, grey and cream markings on the leaves. I have ‘Burgundy Lace’ doing very well and ‘Ursula’s Red’ right next to it doing very poorly. I would advise against drawing the obvious conclusion from that but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Another Athyrium I would not be without is A. otophorum ‘Okanum’, a taller, more subtly coloured fern that seems very accommodating.
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| Athyrium nipponicum 'Burgundy Lace' |
Polystichum setiferum is the native soft shield fern and a number of cultivars of it are widely available. One that I picked up at Binny Plants many years ago was ‘Ray Smith’. It has very long narrow fronds which in some years produce plantlets from which it may be propagated. Polystichum setiferum Plumosomultilobum Group is not going to win friends for its name but makes up for it with its densely mossy foliage. Again its delicate appearance belies a robust constitution.
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| Polystichum setiferum 'Ray Smith' |
I don’t think I could ever grow something just because I liked the name, unless someone were to name a plant after me perhaps. Polystichum polyblepharum is quite good though, and Architectural Plants used to have it in their catalogue with the common name Polly-Polly, which sticks in my mind many years later. It produces tidy rosettes of glossy dark green fronds and has produced a couple of self-sown plants in my garden in twenty years, so well behaved and giving, but not too giving.
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| Polystichum polyblepharum |
Which is probably a fair description of almost all the ferns I grow. They have been trouble free, long lived and rewarding. Would that one could say the same for a lot of other garden plants.
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