Dryopteris remota

Dryopteris ×remota, the remote wood fern or scaly buckler fern, is one of those quiet accidents of nature that turns out better than anything a breeder set out to make. The fern is a naturally occurring hybrid between the scaly male fern, Dryopteris affinis, of western Europe and the British Isles, and the broad buckler fern, Dryopteris expansa, of cooler northern woods. From the affinis parent the hybrid took shaggy stalks thickly clothed in golden-brown scales; from expansa, the fine, lacy cut of the frond. The epithet remota, meaning scattered or spaced apart, points to the way the lowest segments stand a little distant from one another along the frond, a subtle tell that separates this fern from the crowd of look-alike wood ferns.

There is a genuine botanical curiosity folded into this plant. Like the rest of the Dryopteris affinis complex, the remote wood fern is apogamous, meaning the fern sets viable spores without fertilization and comes true from them, so every offspring repeats the parent exactly. A hybrid that would normally be a sterile dead end instead behaves like a stable species, part of why gardeners have kept and passed the fern along for well over a century. The American pteridologist John Mickel, who trialed hundreds of ferns at the New York Botanical Garden, called this one “one of my favorite ferns for the garden,” and coming from Mickel that is close to canonization.

In the garden the remote wood fern reads as architecture rather than filler. Arching, lance-shaped fronds rise two to three feet from a central crown and hold themselves in a tidy, vase-shaped clump that neither flops nor runs, so the fern keeps a composed silhouette from the first spring croziers until frost. Set the fern where the golden scales on the emerging stalks catch a low morning light, underplant with hellebores, epimediums, and woodland phlox, or run a drift of them along a shaded path where their upright poise can steady looser, softer companions.

Few ferns ask for so little. Hardy from USDA zones 4 through 8, the remote wood fern takes light to full shade and average to rich, moisture-retentive soil, tolerates both summer dry spells and hard winter cold, and shrugs off the deer and rabbits that graze almost everything else in the shade border. Give the crown a mulch of leaf litter, cut the tired fronds back before the fiddleheads climb, and this unassuming hybrid will hold that post for decades.

Additional photo credit to Vision Pictures.