{"title":"Wood Ferns","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe wood ferns (\u003cem\u003eDryopteris\u003c\/em\u003e), the evergreen backbone of a shaded garden, from Southern natives like the southern wood fern and the Dixie wood fern to the copper-fronded autumn ferns of East Asia. Slow, tidy, deer-resistant clumps for moist shade, and one of the better stories in botany folded into their chromosomes.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"dryopteris-dilatata-recurvata","title":"Dryopteris dilatata 'Recurvata'","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDryopteris dilatata\u003c\/em\u003e, the broad buckler fern, is a woodland fern of Europe and temperate Asia, carrying broadly triangular, three-times-divided fronds of dark, rich green above stalks clothed in dark-centered scales. The selection \u003cem\u003eDryopteris dilatata\u003c\/em\u003e 'Recurvata' takes that handsome form and adds recurved leaf margins, so each frond reads with extra crinkle and depth, a fine textural plant for the shaded garden.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive the broad buckler fern the cool, moist, humus-rich shade the whole genus prefers, and the semi-evergreen fronds will hold well into winter. Slow, clump-forming, and deer-resistant like the rest of the wood ferns, the plant sits comfortably among hostas and other woodland companions. Woodlanders grew 'Recurvata' as one of the many \u003cem\u003eDryopteris\u003c\/em\u003e forms in a working fern collection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057861365875,"sku":"DRYO-DILA-RECU-01G","price":13.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}]},{"product_id":"dryopteris-felix-mas-undulata-robusta","title":"Dryopteris filix-mas 'Undulata Robusta'","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDryopteris filix-mas\u003c\/em\u003e, the male fern, is one of the great woodland ferns of the Northern Hemisphere, a large, fine-textured plant found wild across Europe, Asia, and North America and grown in gardens for centuries. The species name means literally the male fern, an old contrast with the more delicate lady fern. The selection 'Undulata Robusta' is a robust, vigorous form with gently undulate, wavy frond margins that catch the light along the edge of each leaf.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDeciduous to semi-evergreen, the robust male fern wants cool, moist, shaded ground rich in leaf mould, where the arching fronds build a substantial clump in a season or two. Easy, long-lived, and deer-resistant, the male fern is a plant for the difficult shade beneath trees. Woodlanders carried 'Undulata Robusta' among the many \u003cem\u003eDryopteris\u003c\/em\u003e selections in a broad fern collection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057862479987,"sku":"DRYO-FELI-MAS-UNDU-01G","price":13.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}]},{"product_id":"dryopteris-erythrosora","title":"Dryopteris erythrosora","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe autumn fern, \u003cem\u003eDryopteris erythrosora\u003c\/em\u003e, earns the common name backward: the new fronds arrive in spring the color of turning leaves, a warm copper-orange that seems borrowed from October. As those fronds age they deepen through pink and bronze and finally settle into glossy dark green, so the plant carries a hint of autumn even at the height of the growing season.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA member of the wood-fern family, Dryopteridaceae, the species grows wild in the woodlands of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, where the fronds rise from humus-rich, evenly moist forest floors. The botanical name tells a second story hidden on the undersides of mature fronds: \u003cem\u003eerythrosora\u003c\/em\u003e means \"red sori,\" for the bright red spore cases that stud the leaf backs in late summer and fall, an ornamental detail most gardeners discover by accident and then hunt for every year.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLong a favorite of shade gardeners, the autumn fern carries the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, recognition of steady, dependable performance rather than fussy brilliance. The arching, triangular fronds are semi-evergreen, holding through mild winters to give the shade garden structure at the leanest time of year, then refreshing with a new copper flush as the weather warms.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, plant \u003cem\u003eDryopteris erythrosora\u003c\/em\u003e in dappled to full shade with steady moisture: a woodland border, the north side of the house, a shaded path edge, or the front of a bed beneath trees. Set the ferns in drifts so the spring copper reads as a mass, and pair with hellebores, hostas, hydrangeas, and other shade companions. Photo courtesy of \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/hardyferns.org\/ferns\/dryopteris-erythrosora\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eHardy Fern Foundation\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057862938739,"sku":"DRYO-ERYT-01G","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/2-Dryopteris-erythrosa-WA-Carhart-RAS-6-2012-3-2-47.jpg?v=1722792767"},{"product_id":"dryopteris-celsa","title":"Dryopteris celsa","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis large growing fern is an uncommon native to swamps in the southern U.S. It has bold evergreen fronds. This rare fern is a great garden plant for rich moist soil in shady or semi-shady sites.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057863037043,"sku":"DRYO-CELS-01G","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-785.jpg?v=1720137943"},{"product_id":"dryopteris-cycadina","title":"Dryopteris cycadina","description":"\u003cp\u003eDryopteris cycadina (D. atrata) is an easy-to-grow evergreen garden fern. The stiff leathery pinnate fronds make a good show in the shady or semi-shady woodland garden or along the shady side of a wall or building. .\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057863102579,"sku":"DRYO-CYCA-01G","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-786.jpg?v=1720137946"},{"product_id":"dryopteris-ludoviciana","title":"Dryopteris ludoviciana","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDryopteris ludoviciana\u003c\/em\u003e, the southern shield fern, is a bold, glossy evergreen native to the wet woodlands of the American South. The species epithet \u003cem\u003eludoviciana\u003c\/em\u003e means \"of Louisiana,\" a nod to the swampy bottomlands, blackwater hammocks, and shaded seeps where the fern grows wild, from Florida west to Texas and north through the Carolinas.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhere many ferns read as soft and feathery, the southern shield fern stands upright and architectural, with tall, leathery, dark green fronds that gleam like polished bay leaves. The fronds are dimorphic: the fertile upper portions narrow and contract, carrying the spore cases, while the sterile lower pinnae stay broad and full, a subtle distinction that rewards a close look. Rising in a loose vase shape from a slowly enlarging clump, the fronds bring year-round structure and a quiet sense of permanence to the shaded garden.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWoodlanders has long championed this handsome native, and the fern was brought to wider notice through a Southern Living feature, likely drawn from our own collection. Evergreen through the Deep South and holding a glossy polish when most of the border has gone bare, the southern shield fern is the kind of plant that looks effortless precisely because so little is asked of the gardener once the fern is settled in the right spot.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive \u003cem\u003eDryopteris ludoviciana\u003c\/em\u003e shade to part shade and moist, humus-rich soil, and expect an easy, slow-spreading anchor for a woodland garden, a pond or stream edge, a rain garden, or a shaded path where little else thrives. Pair with other natives, sedges, and shade perennials, and remove the previous year's fronds in early spring to make way for the fresh flush of green.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057863168115,"sku":"DRYO-LUDO-01Q","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-789.jpg?v=1720137949"},{"product_id":"dryopteris-remota","title":"Dryopteris remota","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDryopteris\u003c\/em\u003e ×\u003cem\u003eremota\u003c\/em\u003e, 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, \u003cem\u003eDryopteris affinis\u003c\/em\u003e, of western Europe and the British Isles, and the broad buckler fern, \u003cem\u003eDryopteris expansa\u003c\/em\u003e, 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 \u003cem\u003eremota\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is a genuine botanical curiosity folded into this plant. Like the rest of the \u003cem\u003eDryopteris affinis\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFew 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAdditional photo credit to Vision Pictures.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057863233651,"sku":"DRYO-REMO-01Q","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Dryopterisremotavisionpictures.jpg?v=1777310880"},{"product_id":"dryopteris-x-australis","title":"Dryopteris x australis","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDryopteris\u003c\/em\u003e ×\u003cem\u003eaustralis\u003c\/em\u003e is a fern that cannot, strictly speaking, reproduce, and is all the more vigorous for the lack. This is a natural hybrid, thrown wherever two Southern wood ferns grow within a spore’s reach of one another: the log fern, \u003cem\u003eDryopteris celsa\u003c\/em\u003e, and the southern wood fern, \u003cem\u003eDryopteris ludoviciana\u003c\/em\u003e. The cross comes out sterile, setting spores that never amount to anything, so the fern cannot seed itself across a bed the way a large fern usually will. Every plant in cultivation traces back by division to a wild clump found somewhere between Virginia and Louisiana, the greatest number of them in Alabama.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe pedigree is better than it has any right to be. The log fern parent is itself a hybrid, a fertile cross of that same \u003cem\u003eludoviciana\u003c\/em\u003e with the northern Goldie’s wood fern, \u003cem\u003eDryopteris goldieana\u003c\/em\u003e, which puts \u003cem\u003eludoviciana\u003c\/em\u003e in the family tree twice and tucks a cold-country fern into the third corner. Whatever the arithmetic is doing, the result is the largest fern native to eastern North America. They grow rather as a Christmas fern might, scaled up and stood on end: lance-shaped, lustrous dark green fronds, finely cut and twice-divided, held bolt upright in a dense vase four to five feet tall and half as wide. There is nothing floppy in them. The fronds rise and stay risen, which is uncommon at this size, and the effect in a shaded bed is frankly architectural, a green exclamation where most ferns manage a comma.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSouthern by birth, the fern is unbothered by cold. The fern man John Mickel, who knew the genus as well as anyone, counted this among the great garden ferns and grew them strongly in New York, and they hold reliably from zone 5 through 9. Give them part to full shade and the rich, moist, humusy ground their parents keep along streams and in swampy hammocks. Once established they will take the dry, rooty shade under a canopy without complaint, but a damp footing is where they show off. The one real caution is wind, since fronds this tall can tatter in the open, so site them somewhere sheltered. Semi-evergreen, glossy and green through a mild winter, bronzing and falling after a hard freeze, best cut back before the new fiddleheads climb. Sterile, so they stay precisely where you put them, and increased only by dividing the short creeping rhizome.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA sterile giant with a borrowed pedigree, too well-bred to spread and too handsome to overlook. The tallest native fern in the East, standing at attention in the shade while everything around leans.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057863331955,"sku":"DRYO-AUST-01Q","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1544.jpg?v=1720137955"},{"product_id":"dryopteris-erythrosora-brilliance","title":"Dryopteris erythrosora 'Brilliance'","description":"\u003cp\u003eThere is a moment in early spring when a new frond of \u003cem\u003eDryopteris erythrosora\u003c\/em\u003e 'Brilliance' unfurls, and the sight is one of the more quietly spectacular things a shade garden produces. The emerging fronds are a vivid copper-orange, almost metallic in certain light, deepening through pink and bronze before settling into the glossy dark green of maturity. \u003cstrong\u003e'Brilliance' is a selected form of the autumn fern chosen specifically for the intensity of that color progression, pushing the coppery new growth further than the straight species manages and holding the color longer. In a garden where most plants arrive already green, this is a meaningful distinction.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDryopteris erythrosora\u003c\/em\u003e is native to the forests of China, Japan, and Korea, thriving in the humus-rich, consistently moist soils of woodland understories, conditions that translate directly into garden culture and explain the fern's reliable performance once established. The species name means \"red sori,\" a reference to the bright red spore cases that appear on the undersides of mature fronds in late summer and autumn, another ornamental feature that most gardeners discover by accident and then look for every year afterward.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Brilliance' is semi-evergreen across most of the range, holding fronds through mild winters and providing structure in the garden at the exact moment when structure is most needed. The mature fronds are dark, high-gloss green with a slightly arching habit that lends the plant a composed, architectural quality in the landscape. This is not a fern that asks for attention; the plant earns it by being consistently excellent across every season, in conditions that other plants negotiate poorly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe autumn fern is among the most decorated of shade ferns, holding the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, and the 'Brilliance' selection has collected a fair share of nursery honors too. Whether that reflects the enthusiasm of the judges or the plain merit of the plant is an open question. Both are probably true.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44472914182259,"sku":"DRYO-ERYT-BRIL-01Q","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Dryopteriserythrosora_Brilliance_CathyDewitt.jpg?v=1774300338"}],"url":"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/collections\/wood-ferns.oembed","provider":"Woodlanders","version":"1.0","type":"link"}