Maidenhair Spleenwort Asplenium Trichomanes Rgp / Short Squat

Brightgreen Spleenwort, Dense Spleenwort, Maidenhair Spleenwort, Mountain Spleenwort, Toothed Spleenwort
Asplenium trichomanes

Dainty little evergreen ferns, with small green fronds and thin black stems. They slowly grow and creep on the ground. Native to WNC, much of the Appalachians, and beyond, although never in large numbers. They love moisture, humidity, and cozying up to rocks and stones for shelter. These charming yet low maintenance plants are best in partial to deep shade in moist, well-draining soils. Once established - despite being ferns - they are drought tolerant and forgiving to grow.

Ideal for: Container Gardens, Moss Gardens, Native Gardens, Rock Gardens, Shade Gardens, Small Space Gardens, Woodland Gardens, and more.

🏆Award winning! These plants are have received the prestigious Award of Garden Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society.

🦌Deer resistant: These aren't at the top of the deer menu.

4-8"T x W.

Zones 5a-9b, they are cold hardy down to -20F.

💚Plant Nerd: These unusual plants are part of an ancient lineage, with fossils in China going back to at least the Early Cretaceous, 145-100.5 million years ago! That's around the same time that flowering plants and modern birds first appeared.

Technically, their stems are called stipes.

The genus name, Asplenium, is derived from the Greek (σπλήν, splḗn) and technically means "without a spleen", which is honestly pretty strange, but appears to come to us via centuries of herbal medicine going back to the Ancient Greeks. One strain of thought in early medicine was that if you found a thing in nature that resembled a human organ, it obviously was meant to treat that organ. The little brown sori that contain spores on the undersides of the fern fronds of these plants were thought to resemble the shape of spleens, and therefore these plants were assumed to be helpful herbal spleen medicine. This is carried into the common name of "Maidenhair Spleenwort" - maidenhair due to the resemblence to maidenhair fern, and spleenwort which is an old timey name that means 'this is an important herbal medicine plant for spleens' (anywhere you see a plant name ending -wort go look it up, it means at one point in time, people thought it was a very important plant and there's always stories there). In case you're wondering why these early doctors were so interested in spleens, that relates to the "four humors", the prevailing view in the Western world for 2000 years of how diseases worked in the human body. There's no modern evidence to support the theory that these ferns will help spleens, but it provides interesting insights in both how people viewed their world, and how they utilized the plants around them in every day life - even cute little ferns.