Ferns for Sale

The Best Fern Varieties

Ferns are among the most exotic looking of plants that are at home in Britain, having kept their unhurried, undemanding style for longer than most other plants around.

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Between them, they thrive in both shady and open, rocky locations where few other plants could produce lush foliage: ideal for small pots in shady corners of your patio, or dotted around your borders and underneath trees.

Ferns are hardy and adaptable, far more ancient than dinosaurs. There are about 12,000 fern species, in a primordial, spore-producing plant division with an appropriately dinosaur-sounding name: Pteridophyta, which is separate from all other plants with "normal" seeds and fruit. The oldest fern fossil is from the mid-Devonian period, some 383-393 million years ago, so the first ferns must be even older than that! The specific ferns that were familiar to dinosaurs are extinct, but their diverse descendants are still found almost everywhere on Earth.

Victorian era women were so effective at getting their husbands to build enchanting fern grottos for their gardens that the word Pteridomania, "Fern Fever", was coined by Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, in his 1855 tome Glaucus.

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Pteridomania came hot on the heels of Orchidelirium, and art historians can trace those trends in depictions of ferns and orchids on all manner of objects made throughout the 1800's. The original 1908 Custard Cream biscuit design used a fern pattern, harking bark to that past era.

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