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Polystichum acrostichoides
Christmas Fern
Plant Type:
FERNSPolystichum acrostichoides – The Christmas Fern's lustrous evergreen fronds were used by early settlers as decoration at Christmas time. Christmas Fern thrives in bony woodland soils, organic enough to hold moisture between rains but simultaneously drain well. It is just plain beautiful in pocketd on a rocky, lichen-encrusted boulder or between large rocks on a slope. Polystichum acrostichoides exhibits drought tolerance when well-established. This worthy fern (are there any unworthy ferns?) with its virtual evergreen presence is remarkable texture in northern gardens in winter but is grow-able deep into the south. Christmas Fern is native to all of eastern North America, all states bordering west of the Mississippi River plus Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas. Interestingly, Christmas Fern, according to maps, occurs in the very same states where Cinnamon Fern naturally resides. Open shade, dappled shade to morning sun will keep it happy. Please scroll down to the Genus Overview for more information about ferns. Pot grown Division.
Characteristics and Attributes for Polystichum acrostichoides
Season of Interest (Foliage)
- Four Seasons
Nature Attraction
- Deer Resistant
Light
- Dappled Shade
- Morning Sun / Afternoon Shade
- Shade
Attributes
- Woodland
- Natural Garden
- Climbing
- Cutting Garden
- Foliage
- Evergreen
- Rock Garden
- Massing
Growth Rate in the Garden
- Slow
Soil
- Woodland
- Scrabbled
- Fertile
- Moist
- Draining
Origins
- Eastern North America
Propagated By
- Division
Genus Overview: Ferns
Ferns. The easy, elegant and exceptional beauty of ferns cannot be understated. All ferns, beautiful as specimens unto themselves, are extraordinary in their simple ability to provide rich contrast to other companions wherever their requirements befit.
Habituated to so many environments many of the ferny pteridophytes – vascular plants that reproduce by spores, not seeds - are woodland denizens thriving on the cool, damp forest floor like the Christmas Fern, Polystichum acrostochoides with some preferring the wetter disposition of bogs, swamps, and stream banks such as Osmunda cinnamomea. Others will colonize gritty soils in shade or sun like the running Hay-scented fern, Dennstaedtia punctilobula and many among the Cheilanthes. Some are tough enough to grasp a foothold in the crack of a rock, these are lithophytic, as with Asplenium trichomanes. And some – most of these tropical in origin are truly epiphytic, clinging to tree bark as they unfurl their fronds from embryonic croziers to reach into the forest light such as the primitive looking Staghorn Fern, Platycerium bifurcatum or Rabbit-foot Fern, Davallia fejeensis .
And many have historic medicinal uses such as Maidenhair Fern, Adiantum pedtaum – this from medicinalherbinfor.org, “Expectorant, anti-rheumatic, demulcent, pectoral, refrigerant, tonic”... Native Americans throughout North America used maidenhair as a hair wash to make their hair shiny.” And in a more Bacchanalian use: as a flavoring in liquers.
There was probably something fern-like, an ancient ferny forebear(s) if you will, living during the Devonian some 60 to 70 million years ago. Ferns, some we still recognize today are descendents from an ancient order whose reign during the Carboniferous Age is legend, where giant horsetails and monstrous club mosses still populate the misty recesses of our dreams... and whose contemporary plundering by Homo sapiens in the vast burning of fossil fuels is altering our climate at such an alarming rate that more among the many are beginning to query as to the potential for another mass extinction – the closing chapter of another age, a blip in the larger context of perceived time. But I digress....
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