Ferns and Other Forbs - Part 1
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A nonwoody plant other than a grass, sedge or rush. |
The woodland floor is a secret place. Plants, often unnoticed in the profusion of greenery, go about their business quietly. Until you literally crawl a woodland floor, you never know just what plants are part of the jumble.
Ferns
Mother Nature does not care for bare ground.
In early summer, my woodland appears to be a sheet of green, without and inch of bare ground to be seen. In late summer / early fall, when some of the weedy things have died back, it's another story. I found my woods to be relatively bereft of really choice woodland natives. Of those I consider choice, four species of ferns are the most conspicuous.
Christmas Fern
Polystichum acrostichoides places itself here and there, singly, in colonies and in communities with other species; in dense shade or on the south side of slopes; in moist hollows and on dry hills. It is a most adaptable and durable plant - a workhorse of the shady or woodland garden. Mounds of evergreen, shiny, leathery, dark green fronds are most visible in winter, when little else is green. True, they are a bit weather beaten by end of winter, but you can either ignore this and leave the old fronds to decay and feed the soil or, if you are very tidy-minded and they get on your nerves, clip them off in early spring to make room for the new ones.
Apple green fronds unfurl in spring from tight buds peeping, knuckle like from brown, scaly crowns. When the croziers start to open, they wear their papery coverings like party hats on inebriated New Year's Eve celebrants. The croziers curl downward, toward the crown of the plant, but their weight causes the young stems to bend outward in generally graceful 'S' curves or goose-necks - no two stems exactly the same - in exuberant celebration of spring. By the time they mature, the fronds become more subdued and orderly, standing straight at first then gradually arching gracefully from the clump, until the weight of the old year flattens them to the ground.
Polystichum is a large genus which contains many of the loveliest garden ferns. They all like good drainage and acidic soil, although there are some who prefer a bit of lime. Most are evergreen. Christmas fern is native to north east America and hardy from USDA zones 3 to 8.
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