Fern Plants - from the woods to your garden

Ferns like to grow in a enviroment, where the sunlight barely reaches directly the ground. Fern plants like often grow in woods where the sunlight is blocked by trees. The inner leaf structure of fern plants is totally adapted to these conditions.
The vast majority of ferns grows in soils wich have high density of humus. There are also some ferns that have adapted to live on other plants, most of them being trees.
This can be seen specially in tropical countries.

Fern plants show between them a big difference in the growing speed. Many of them have rhizomes, that allows them to reproduce very quickly. One good example is the plant fern with ca..... Others are very small and do not require much space.

They also differ in the color of their leaves. Even some of the plant ferns carry the name of Rainbow Fern (Athyrium niponicum 'Metallicum'), thanks to the abundant and beautiful colors of their leaves. The rest stand out displaying auttum colors during that season.
An additional advice to put fern plants in your garden is the fact that the leaves stay green during the winter, like, for example Polystichum aculeatum variety. Fern usually have two kind of leaves, with and without groups of brown sphoropythe.

They can really stand out when they grow above the ground during spring. The leaves are rolled and during spring they roll out
Fern plants, do not flourish, and, depite that, they have managed to survive during millions of years.
But these prehistoric plants do form groups of sphorophyte in the leaves called "fertiles'. They are brown and are disposed in different ways in the low side of those leaves. Spores get free from the sporothytes and,as they are microscopic, they spread around thanks to the wind.