Compotonia peregrina –  ​​2 remaining. Sweetfern is one tough customer. It will adapt itself to dry hardcore scrabble in full blazing sun. An interesting native, it sports stems with coarsely notched and scalloped alternating pinnate foliage loosely resembling fern fronds. Sweet Fern spreads rapidly fixing nitrogen in the soil as it expands its domain. It is a colonizing, ground covering shrub. Comptonia will even tolerate salty conditions at the shore. Its delightful fragrance (hence the common moniker Sweetfern) was not lost on early settlers who stuffed mattresses with its dried and pleasantly aromatic plumes. This wily ground cover generally grows about 2’ to 2.5’ tall but in better soil conditions could rise as high as 4’. I have run across colonies, dwarfed by desperate condition, growing only 12” to 14” high. Cutting grown.