Christmas Fern

The most adaptable native fern. evergreen, deer-proof, drought-tolerant, and gorgeous year-round in virtually any shaded site.

Christmas Fern is the fern that stays green when everything else in the winter garden has gone dormant. Dark, glossy, leathery fronds arch outward from a central crown all season. Their evergreen nature is the quality that made colonists cut them for Christmas decorations, giving the plant its name. In January, when the garden is bare and brown, a mass of Christmas Fern reads as a deliberate, intentional planting that's doing exactly what you put it there to do. New fronds emerge each spring as fiddleheads: tightly coiled, silver-scaled cylinders that unfurl slowly into the characteristic lance-shaped fronds. The fresh green of new fronds against the older darker growth creates a pleasant two-tone effect in spring before the old fronds flatten and blend in. It tolerates the widest range of shade conditions of any native fern, dry, moist, dense, or dappled, performing reliably where more delicate ferns struggle. The most adaptable evergreen ground cover in the shade garden, full stop. Plant it on shaded slopes to control erosion, mass it under trees as a year-round ground cover, or use it as a backdrop for spring-blooming woodland ephemerals.