Polystichum acrostichoides George Forrest flowering in August and September

flowering in August and September and sometimes later still

From the affinis parent the hybrid took shaggy stalks thickly clothed in golden-brown scales

raspberry-like fruits

In spring the new growth comes up like asparagus or young bamboo

pinnate leaves along dense

Polystichum acrostichoides George Forrest flowering in August and SeptemberFor a plant this common, the Christmas fern carries an oddly specific origin for the name. The fern was christened, the story goes, by one John Robinson, a botany professor at the Peabody Academy in Salem, Massachusetts, sometime in the late 1800s, and set down for posterity in a 1923 volume with the irreproachable title The Fern Lover's Companion. Robinson's reasoning was seasonal. When the other ferns of the eastern woods go brown and crisp at the