Marginal Wood Fern

The marginal wood fern, also called the marginal shield fern, is an evergreen fern of the wood fern family Dryopteridaceae found in damp, shaded woodland from Texas and Minnesota to Newfoundland across eastern North America. It grows one to two feet tall with thick, leathery, dark blue-green leaves and a stipe covered in bright golden-brown scales. Its rounded spore clusters sit along the margins of the leaflets, a trait that gives the species its name, and pass through gray and blue-violet shades before ripening to brown. It favors rocky, moderately acid to circumneutral slopes and stream banks, tolerates drought once established, and in warmer parts of its range is largely confined to shaded, north-facing rock faces.