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Dryopteris intermedia
Also called Evergreen Wood Fern, Fancy Fern, Intermediate Wood Fern, American Shield Fern, Common Wood Fern, Evergreen Shield Fern, Fancy Wood Fern
Intermediate woodfern is a hardy, evergreen perennial fern native to eastern North America, grown in shade gardens. It needs part to full shade and consistently moist soil.
Dryopteris intermedia, the intermediate wood fern or evergreen wood fern, is a perennial, evergreen wood fern native to eastern North America. It is a diploid species, and is the parent of several species of hybrid origin, including Dryopteris carthusiana. Other common names for this species include intermediate shield fern, fancy wood fern, fancy fern, glandular wood fern, American shield fern and common wood fern.
This fern is often confused with several other wood fern species, including D. carthusiana, D. campyloptera, and D. expansa. It especially extensively shares the range of D. carthusiana, but the two may be distinguished by the innermost pinnule on the bottom side of the bottom pinna: this pinnule is longer than the adjacent pinnules in D. carthusiana, but shorter or even in D. intermedia.
Dryopteris intermedia is cultivated as an ornamental plant in North America for gardens, especially natural gardens and shade gardens, as it is easy to grow in a range of environments and soils and does not spread much. Care needs to be taken when planting to ensure that the fern is placed in an area of part-shade or full-shade and that the soil remains moist, as it does not tolerate a lot of sun or dry soil.
Dryopteris intermedia is native to most of eastern North America, ranging from Minnesota in the north-west and Newfoundland and Labrador in the north-east, down to Alabama in the south-west and South Carolina in the south-east. While globally secure, it is considered by NatureServe to be "critically imperiled" in the states of Iowa and Missouri which represent the western limit of its range, and "imperiled" in the states of Illinois and South Carolina as well as the region of Labrador. Similar ferns found in the Azores are often regarded as a subspecies (subsp. azorica) or as a different species (Dryopteris azorica).
Scaly Male Fern · Coastal woodfern · Shaggy Wood Fern · Broad buckler-fern · Autumn Fern · Male fern · Southern woodfern · Siebold's Wood Fern · Alpine woodfern · Woodfern · Wood Fern
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Dryopteris intermedia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
