Hardy Ferns

A fern is any one of a group of about 12,000 species of plants belonging to the botanical group known as Pteridophyta. Unlike mosses, they have xylem and phloem (making them vascular plants). They have stems, leaves, and shoots like other vascular plants, but ferns reproduce via spores and have neither seeds nor flowers.

Ferns first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago in the Carboniferous period but many of the current families and species did not appear until roughly 145 million years ago in the early Cretaceous period (after flowering plants came to dominate many environments). Ferns are not of major economic importance, but some are grown or gathered for food, grown as ornamental plants, for remediating contaminated soils, and have been the subject of research for their ability to remove some chemical pollutants from the air. Some are significant weeds, such as bracken. Ferns also play a role in mythology, medicine, and art, but most importantly for us they are highly ornamental and useful in the garden to bring shape and form, especially to shadier areas of the garden. By Hardy Fern we simply mean to imply that it will be hardy throughout most of the British Isles, at least in gardens.