Polystichum acrostichoides George Forrest widely planted for the great

widely planted for the great show of white spring bracts (the true flowers are the small green knot at the center)

flowering in August and September and sometimes later still

and woke to climb in search of the source

the most theatrical

pinnate leaves along dense

Polystichum acrostichoides George Forrest widely planted for the greatFor 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