Adiantum hispidulum

Maidenhairs take their English name from their stems, those fine black wiry stalks like strands of dark hair, and their Latin name from a quieter trick. Adiantum comes from the Greek adiantos, the unwetted one, because water will not cling to the fronds. Hold a maidenhair under a running tap and it comes out dry, the droplets beading and rolling off a surface built to refuse them. It is the sort of small marvel ferns keep to themselves until you go looking. This particular maidenhair breaks the family mold in one telling way. Where the rest are a byword for fragility, all lace and apology, this one is faintly hairy and unbothered about it. Run a fingertip up the stipe and you will feel the bristles that named it: hispidulum, minutely hairy, set down by the Swedish botanist Olof Swartz in 1802.

The show is in the new growth. Fronds unfurl a vivid rosy pink, almost startling against the older leaves, before they harden off to a leathery dark green edged in bronze. They come up in hand-shaped, branching fans, the segments radiating like fingers from a point, which is how the plant collected its other name, five-fingered jack. Twelve to eighteen inches, clumping in neat tufts from short rhizomes rather than running off anywhere. Beneath the fertile fronds, along the very edges of the leaf, the spore cases hide under little folded-down flaps, false hems the fern turns over its own margins to cover them.

They come from a long way off, and from almost everywhere: the shaded rainforests and rocky riverbanks of Australia, New Zealand, tropical Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, a genuinely pantropical fern. They have found the American South agreeable enough to slip out of a few gardens and naturalize along the Gulf, from Louisiana to Florida, which tells you most of what you need to know about siting one. Give them humus-rich, moist, well-drained ground in part shade, sheltered from wind, with the better-than-average humidity the whole tribe prefers. They take a little more sun than most maidenhairs without scorching, though they look their best in dappled light. Hardy in zones 8 to 10, deciduous through a Southern winter, semi-evergreen where it stays warm, and the most forgiving maidenhair of all on an east-facing windowsill. In a cold-edge garden they may sulk until midsummer before pushing the first pink fronds, so do not write them off in May.

A maidenhair that comes up pink, sheds the rain, and wears its bristles without apology. Tougher than it looks, softer in color than it has any right to be, and green wherever the winters let it stay.