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Athyrium x nipponicum 'Branford Beauty'
Japanese Painted Fern
Plant Type:
FERNSAthyrium x nipponicum 'Branford Beauty' – This elegant intermediate hybrid between A. nipponicum 'Pictum' (Japanese Painted Fern) and the red-stemmed form of A. filix-femina (Lady Fern) exhibits a reddish main stalk underscoring the silvery green foliage frond approaching the color of reindeer moss. The Lady Fern influence is seen in the articulated form of each frond with the silver color of Japanese Painted Fern; the red main stalk is the influence of either or both parents... ah, genetics! 'Branford Beauty' forms and upright plant with a clumping habit. Lights up in open, dappled shade to morning sun siting planted in fertile ground. Exhibits drought tolerance in shade once established. Please scroll down to the Genus Overview for more information about ferns. Pot grown division.
Characteristics and Attributes for Athyrium x nipponicum 'Branford Beauty'
Season of Interest (Foliage)
- Spring / Summer / into Autumn
Nature Attraction
- Deer Resistant
Light
- Morning Sun / Afternoon Shade
- Dappled Shade
- Shade
Attributes
- Foundation
- Specimen
- Border
- Natural Garden
- Foliage
- Edging
- Woodland
- Massing
- Cutting Garden
Growth Rate in the Garden
- Medium
Soil
- Draining
- Fertile
Origins
- Garden Origin
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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