Step Into The Wonderful World Of Ferns with UK Expert Mark Border 🌿

hi everyone it's Janette here the enthusiastic Gardener and I have an extra video for you this week and it's a very special video and I'm delighted to be able to share it with you thank you for your wonderful comments about Woodland Courtyard and uh how much you liked it so I'm delighted about that but you may know one of the main reasons why I added all these extra baskets into Woodland Courtyard was because I wanted to repot all the beautiful FS that my friend Mark B sent to me and so that was the main reason why all these baskets and everything came into Woodland Courtyard and it made it so delightful but I was talking to Mark and I said to him will you share some information about ferns for everyone because you are truly the expert and he's very kindly agreed to do that here so let me just tell you a little bit information about Mark and he started gardening in when he was a boy his parents were both heavily into gardening and he said that his interest in ferns came about because he was so mad about dinosaurs as a young boy and he thought well the closest thing I can get to dinosaurs is to grow some dinosaur food and that's where the fern passion started so he went with his parents to the famous Elizabeth strangeman Nursery very famous lady and specializing in helbor and alpines and also ferns she gave him his first Ferns and started it all off his collection so he since joined the British pteridological Society he's been a member for 40 years he writes some of their newsletters you can find them on their website I'll put the details of the website on the screen here and he strongly encourages anyone who's interested to join he says you get uh as well as meeting likeminded people you get journals every year you get I think it was 25 spores every year where you can start your collection and start growing and also if you go to the meetings there's a lot of fern swapping going on Mark lives in a place called beex Hill on sea which is near Hastings it's on the Southeast coast of England he's been there since 1966 Mark says if you have any questions at all because he is the expert please put them in the comments below I won't be able to answer them so but I'll be reading them with interest too he will jump in and he will answer questions for you he's also left his email address um in the video and also I'll put that in the description below he finally says if anyone is in the area of Beck Hill on sea which is near Hastings East Sussex southeast of England on the coast please he'll be happy to see you if you want to pop round he'll give you a tour and you can see his Fern collection in person you cannot get a better invitation than that so without further Ado here's my friend Mark border hello I'm Mark Boulder Janette suggested it might be interesting to do a short piece for one of her wonderful weekly videos uh she suggested something ferny so uh I thought maybe look in my Greenhouse might interest some of you first a quick apology as you'll shortly see my Greenhouse currently has a quite a few hanging baskets waiting to go out from the summer these are quite heavy and quite large and I keep hitting my head on them so I've apologies if Janette has to do some beeping out during the course of it but let's head up there right we'll fight our way past the tree fern to start with these bags contain the spings for the Next Generation I'll just show you what they're like inside this is the first stage as the uh spores developed what's called a proales which is a little kidney shaped uh plantlet these develop hopefully into larger kidney shaped things like this and from these we move to the first FRS appearing on ferns this particular one is a polistic cerum that I read called Alfie named after my oldest grandson unfortunately I'm struggling to propagate this um at the moment uh there is only one plant of Alfie uh I hope these survive this is my fourth attempt to get young [Music] plants then the next stage they got considerably bigger and these I will be gradually hardening off to come out when they will look like these and these are now waiting for me to putp them on this particular one is pisum transvalensis which comes from uh South Africa just a quick word on pronunciation this one everybody gets wrong I can get it in focus and everybody pronounces it as poti but it should be [Music] polistic this is AR arachnoides the Voris and it gets the name the Voris because the frond looks rather like a dilia and up here in the hanging basket we have a dilia and hopefully you can see the similarity of the frond these are normally or commonly named rabbit's foot ferns or hairs foot ferns because of the somewhat furry ryone this one is actually Hardy I've uh had a small piece out all winter but I only bought this last year so I'm keeping a pit in inside as well for insurance purposes one that isn't Hardy unless you're lucky enough to live in the silly Isles or somewhere similar but is often seen as a house plant is a splenium bulbiferum this again is a young one I only got it last year but as you can see hopefully it produces baby plants on the front and these can be pinned down and grown on and uh some point during this year I'll split these up and pot them up separately another one although it's not doing so yet that produces easy plantlets is cystopteris bulbiferum from North America and this produces little buds that drop on the floor in late summer autumn and root away and you get new [Music] plants although it's looking a bit scruffy at the moment I'm quite pleased with this plant this is coogam tronica from Japan uh which I Grew From spores about 4 years ago uh common name is bamboo Fern for Fairly obvious reasons and this one is producing new frons now I go down hopefully we can find them yes just coming through you can see the uh new FRS unfortunately the one next to it which is quog Grand onen from China is uh not doing so as yet and the FRS are in rather a bad state but when they're growing well they do look stunning with their yellow markings and next to it a Japanese version this one is intermediate and uh it's a varietal name is if I pull the label out Yori Musha I've probably mispronounced that so apologies to any Japanese who happen to be watching these bamboo ferns are Hardy unfortunately I have to grow them in here because uh they are a favorite food of slugs and snails of which my garden has rather too many but I know a number of growers in Belgium Holland and Germany they succeed with them very successfully outside sticking with Japan we come down here aium oorum okum another one that's perfectly Hardy but my garden doesn't like ethereums it's too dry for them so I keep this one in here and when it clumps up enough that I can split it I will try some more outside another ethereum this time a cultivar of our native lady fern is this one etherum Felix femina plumosum barns this is an old Victorian cultivar and one of the best again being the native entirely Hardy but as I said my garden is a bit too dry for them so again this one I'm keeping in here and if it produces enough side crowns I will move uh move some outside we'll head down a bit and in the pot there is a young tree fern Saia kooper ey uh that's about 3 years old threw that from spores from my larger one which I'll show you in a minute and then down below it is a Fone from New Zealand microsorum diversifolium sometimes seen uh in garden centers as a house plant and it's almost Hardy I've seen photographs of it in southern Ireland growing superbly climbing up trees and looking really good uh here I'm trying to get it to climb up this dead tree fern stem it's just beginning to do so this unfurling front here is from uh relative of the tree ferns that once people start getting into ferns uh in a big way this sets very quickly the top of their Wanted list it's called laasa crri pinata it grows in Mexico um down in Central South America and down into Chile uh doesn't look particularly spectacular except when it gets very large it can be uh over 12T long the fron but the real beauty of it is when we get down to it and we do this and show you the underside quite spectacular in my opinion and nearly every other person's opinion who grows it this will grow outside and I have one that's been out for a few years uh but it suffered badly this last winter move over here to a little miniature tree fern uh this is Blum gibum although a lot of the bams have had a name change and this is now oion opto gibber but uh in a any Garden Center and it does appear quite often in a garden center you'll see it under the name of blam Gibbon it produces little stems which are beautiful deep black against the Green I don't know whether I can show you a favorite of mine Jim no carpium Omen another Far Eastern one uh this is Hardy I had this outside for several years unfortunately the last couple of really hot summers have done for it fortunately I had this biding here for insurance and uh I will split a bit of off of this later and try again outside somewhere else another favorite is growing next to it which is this one common name is the carrot Fern this one is called onium japonicum from again obviously Japan but there are several other species and apart from being a very delicate very beautiful Fern I like this one because if you're really lucky you can go down on the beach at Hastings and along the coast at pet not far from where I live and you can find fossils of an almost identical Fern that is 120 million years old uh and you compare the two they are virtually identical now most people think the ferns of course has been green and they tend to be but not always this is another black num uh this one from South America uh black num ocidental climbing up this uh wicker frame my first ever attempt at basket weaving is another Japanese fern lodium japonicum uh this is a climbing Fern something that few people uh realize exist and again this is almost Hardy I had this outside for five or six years unfortunately it only uh ever grew about 6 in uh before the winter came and chopped it back to the ground so I've moved it in here here it stays Evergreen and as you can see grows quite a bit bigger another unfurn likee Fern growing next to it which I did I believe send Jette a piece of is this pyroa uh this is a form of paria liua again from the Far East the normal liua is over here see just a simple frond for some reason this isn't growing as well as the cultivar this is proving to be Hardy I had a piece out all last winter uh perfectly happy and I got know again the uh Dutch and Belgian Growers have no problem with it in their Gardens this is the trunk of dixia sarosa a tree fern from New Zealand that grows in bogs this uh like little bump on the side is a shoot unusual for tree ferns if the main stem dies that shoot will then Sprout uh if the whole of the main stem dies then there will be shoots from underground will come up most refe ferns if they lose their trunk then they are dead but scosa is very kind which is just as well for me because I've nearly killed it several times this is one that needs water and water and water and water and then you start again and water it some more but it's already producing its fifth new frond of the year and this is one which is developing very nicely [Music] and although not as good as the loosa I find the underside of the fronts on this one are very attractive here's a better view of the underside of theonia s cler fium orium GLA is from the Caribbean and Northern South America grows naturally on logs branches hence going on here uh the AA is uh referring to the allegedly golden scales but we just move through this polypodium formosum they are more of a coppery color than gold it's still very attractive past the blue green polypodium formosum and you can see the ryes hanging under there looking for somewhere else to grow on to those of you who regularly receive Bunches of flowers May well recognize this uh Fern if it has Fern fonds in the bunch then it's this plant rora adiantiformis commonly known as a leather Fern this Grows All Around The Southern hemosphere and there's another one that is almost Hardy I have had it survive outside but that's all it does it doesn't grow it just sits there and does nothing but in the hanging basket sitting out in the summer in the greenhouse in the winter it does absolutely fine and this one is going to need to be depotted fairly soon you can see over here it's beginning to break out of the side of the basket and round here it's done so even more I mentioned the young sciaa kooper ey earlier well this is the parent plant this I Grew From spores about 12 years ago and it's done rather too well and it's basically reaching pretty near as big a size as I can accommodate because the pot is now getting very heavy to lift in and out each winter this frond is the third one for this year already I'm going to have to cut a couple of these off as I take it out Cooper ey comes from Australia given enough water it can take quite a bit of sun and it can grow to quite a size it will reach 40 ft tall with individual fonts that can be 20 ft long and this is just one of this year's new fs and I noticed this morning when I looked at it don't know if you can make out tiny little pale green dots on the underside there but they will be the spores for this year so I can collect some more and sew some more of it [Music] [Music] another pyrrosia this one pyrrosia Shiri again looking very unlike a fern but living up to its name of felt Fern the underside and these are last year's spor cases are very FY to the touch this is proven quite Hardy I've had it outside for a couple of years and uh again The Growers in northern Europe they are doing it plenty of new FRS just showing through now so this will be going out and hanging up for the summer in the next week or two I'll finish with another atypical Fern this is the Stags horn Fern plat Serum by fatum this comes from New Guinea jaara Northern Australia it has two types of frond the uh Stags horn looking fronds are the fertile frons the spores appear on the undersides of these uh this one is yet to produce any and then the sterile FRS are these brown ones behind it these wrap around three branches and three trunks you can just see a new green sterile fond that will develop wrap around these others and grip onto the board that it's mounted on these are very good at recycling uh in the back of this they collect any fallen leaves bird droppings dead flies anything at all which form a compost and they live on that they also decompose their own old frons and AD that to their food source there is quite a few different species of platic serum unfortunately all but this one are tropical so I can't grow them but there are some really magnificent specimens around I hope you found something of interest in this if you have any questions I'm very happy to answer any that I can either through the video or you can contact me directly by email my email address is Mark border icloud.com all other case thank you bye-bye well thank you so much Mark that I found so interesting and I'm learning about ferns I've learned that I need to say polistic instead of polum so polistic and uh I don't know how you know all those names how you remember them is beyond me but I suppose all those years of experience you you will have learned them my guest anyway thank you so much for watching thank you so much Mark you're a very very lovely friend and I'm honored to know you see you all on Monday everyone take care bye