Plant Wiki

The open plant encyclopedia

Know any plant.
Grow it well.

Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.

  • 13,000+plants with full pages
  • 365,000+plant species worldwide
  • 220+countries covered

Common in

See all

The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.

What do you want to do?

Popular plants

Browse all plants

See them in 3D

All plants in 3D

Browse plants

Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.

Plant Wiki › Browse plants

Lemmon's hollyfern

Polystichum lemmonii

Also called Lemmon's Holly Fern, Shasta Holly Fern, Shasta Sword Fern, Shasta Fern

Lemmon's hollyfern
Photo: J Brew, CC BY-SA 2.0

Lemmon's hollyfern is a small, evergreen woodland fern from western North America, found on serpentine rock and soils in mountains. It is seldom grown in gardens, and it does best in cool, well-drained, gritty conditions with some shade.

Family
Dryopteridaceae (Wood fern family)
Grows as
Fern
Light
Part shade, Shade
Water
Keep the soil evenly moist during the growing season and let the top layer dry slightly between waterings.
Soil
Gritty, well-drained mix, ideally with some serpentine or lime-rich grit.
Temperature
Hardy to around -20 °C; protect from sustained heat above 30 °C.
How easy
Moderate
Native range
S. British Columbia to NW. U.S.A.
Climate
temperate

About

Polystichum lemmonii is a species of fern known by the common names Lemmon's holly fern and Shasta fern. It is native to western North America from the Sierra Nevada of California north to Washington. It is also known from British Columbia, where there is an occurrence in the mountains above the Okanagan Valley. and another in the mountains near Harrison Lake.

Where it grows

P. lemmonii grows in mountainous habitat on ultramafic rock substrates, almost always in serpentine soils or among serpentine rocks. Though it grows in very restricted areas, P. lemmonii can be locally very abundant.

Other Polystichum plants

Christmas fern · Hard shield-fern · Aleutian holly fern · Harsh Shield Fern · Polystichum bonapartii · Braun's hollyfern · Polystichum bulbiferum · Monte Guilarte hollyfern · California swordfern · Madeira Shield-Fern · Dudley's swordfern · Polystichum fallax

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Polystichum lemmonii 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.

Credits & terms

Identify a plant

Point at a leaf or flower and snap. One plant in frame works best.

Your photo
Starting camera…