I purchased a lovely 4ft high Dicksonia Antarctica Tree Fern at the weekend from B&Q and I was wondering if anyone had any ideas as to the best way to plant it. Pot or ground? My husband wants one of those large stainless steel looking pots to put it in but every time I plant something in a pot it doesnt do so well. (Read my Trachlospermum jasminoides post lol) I have a nice shady spot at the front of my garden slightly under my pear tree that i think would be nice, any ideas? Also if it is better in a pot do I put it straight in a pot or in a large plastic pot then in a fancy pot?

Any help would be much appreciated.

thanxs Tina

Dicksonia antarctica puts out more under ground roots than people realise, it may not a be a full system but they put out enough to give the trunk a good hold in the soil, and after a few years its a good size root ball.

Resin

The plant will grow with far more vigour and prove to be hardier if it is planted in a good, free-draining, but moist, humus enriched soil. Large pots are OK as a temporary measure while you are deliberating a final planting site, but they are not ideal in the long term and even with the relatively shorter leaves produced, are likely to topple over in stormy weather.

Resin is correct about leaving the fronds on the plant. Most have retained them undamaged this past winter and green fronds continue to produce food for the plant. Removing them before they have died off reduces the amount of food produced resulting in shorter and fewer leaves the following season. A tree fern's performance is related to the previous year's growing conditions and these determine the amount of carbohydrates it manages to store in the leaf bases and central core. The more food manufactured and stored, the greater the quantity and quality of fronds produced during the ensuing growing season.

Pineresin, yes thanks for that i think i read that somewher. I think thats what happens naturally when they are in the wild.

Dave Poole, I think i will defo put it in the ground now! Thanks for all your great advice.

Tina

Well, there's not a SHRED of truth in it, as ought to be blindingly obvious to anybody who has ever worked with tree ferns. Dicksonia antarctica stumps will always re-grow significant root mats if given the room, devouring the organic matter in their compost at a frightening rate. With sufficiently high humidity, they send out dramatic carpets of green-tipped surface roots too. Thus, only HUGE tubs are practical for serious medium-term container care. But if you possibly can, plant DA's in the ground from day one, and keep re-mulching them whenever possible.

Incidentally, what does it say about our 'experts' that they would make such foolish claims...clearly based on no direct hands-on knowledge of tree ferns at all? Anybody who has ever re-potted a tree fern - as you are compelled to at regular intervals - can't have failed to be struck by the vigorous root activity. Not one of these media charlatans has ever done it, I would surmise.

Steve Pope - Brighton, Susex Coast

Once they're established they are reasonably drought-resistant but if you are expecting a long dry summer wrap the trunk with sacking and keep it damp. Also put down a deep mulch comprised of old leaf litter and bark chips.

Here there is usually there is a leaf-drop by the overhead evergreen trees toward spring, prior to flowering. This material holds in the moisture from the winter.

It is normal for there to be a dry spell in our February - your August - but it would be prudent to provide moisture over this time until the stem has re-established. Unless there is something unusual occuring with the weather, there is some rain each month, and mist at higher altitudes here where the Dicksonias grow.

Soil preparation can include peat, sand, rotted sawdust and loamy soil plus some bonedust.

Some of the Carex 'grasses' might be planted in the area to provide some cooling for the fern's underground system.

Give wind protection. The tree ferns usually grow in associations which provide interruptions for howling gales. And/or in sheltered sites such as gullies beside streams. The majority of those plants are evergreen and also produce a surface root system which tends to trap pockets of moisture and leaf litter.

You can try them in a pot. I know one chap who grew several as bonsai, but the challenge was to keep them moist enough to thrive while remaining well-drained - and provide a nutritious root run.

If you do decide to make a 'shade/fern house' (however small) it is not necessary to confine yourself to southern ferns/plants but it is essential to keep the mulch topped up so nothing ends up dry and starving.

Tina

The odds on success with Dicksonia antarctica must be 99.9 per cent. You'll be delighted, I'm sure.

Steve - Brighton

But if you've already committed to a proprietary shrub compost plus topsoil, well...think about enhancing it over time with your regular mulching regime. A carpet of organically rich compost. applied nice and thick around the trunk and (future) root radius, will immediately start to tip the balance towards a damper, more 'forest-floor' type of micro-habitat. Repeat as often as you can bear to - with all that heavy watering it soon degrades and wears away.

Steve - Brighton, Sussex Coast

I've read this thread and its all good interesting stuff. But I still have a question.

I was given a 4ft Dicksonia Antartica, the person who had it was scared they were killing it as the tree had a couple of new frons started developing in the crown centre but they died, what did they do wrong? how do I prevent it happening again?, I don't want to kill it any further.

I have left it in the pot all summer. I read that they like ericacious conditions and I have alkaline soil, pretty much clay to be honest. So I thought it would be better off in the pot. I've watered it all summer a few of the frones got a little bit singed but all in all it seems healthy.
Heres my list of questions:
Can I plant it in the garden with my soil conditions?
I know it has to be a shaded site the only shade in my garden is at the back under a line of oak trees, would it survive being planted next to such large established trees?
Should I just pot it on to a larger pot with ericacious compost?
Should I feed it with ericacious feeder i.e 'Miracle grow'?
I saw a fleece bag to protect them on Gardners world this week, has anybody use them? successfully?

Sorry to load up the questions, I just really don't want to kill this plant.

Thanks

Given the sort of price you pay for Dicksonias I can understand erring on the side of caution. I've certainly seen young fronds here lost to fairly light frosts if hit at the wrong time - repeated too often this would obviously weaken the plant long-term (though I think the frond loss which wellies plant suffered was more likely simply due to lack of water).

At maturity (200+ years, so a longish wait) it is a fairly large plant - reaching 5 metres or more. Because of this it will do better with as large a root run as possible. If it has to be a pot then get the largest one you can, but direct planting would be better. I've seen these growing in karst limestone country, but insulated from the sub soil by a deep layer of organic soil (in the way that acid oak woodland can develop atop the chalk south of London). If you think your clay soil is likely to be too alkaline I'd suggest considering a raised bed made in the way that a traditional 'peat' bed is constructed for rhodos and the like.

People here in Tassie do grow them in full sun, mostly because they are so common and cheap as to be undervalued, but the plants don't like it - there is obvious bleaching and hunching of the fronds. They are a rainforest understorey plant (though extending into drier areas along streams and the like); they need some shade and a reasonable amount of water. But as Footfullof..spikeylawnweeds(!) says they are fairly robust if well-placed. After all the tree ferns at Heligan survived years of neglect. If your plant seems to be doing OK, just relax and enjoy it.

To quote Jamie Kirkpatrick about the (alpine) climate of Tassie "The unreliability of snow is a direct result of the highly maritime nature of the Tasmanian high mountain climate. The sea cools and warms more slowly than land, so its influence moderates temperatures. More continental mountains, such as Kosciusko, have much colder winters than are experienced anywhere in Tasmania, so they enjoy a much more constant and complete snow cover." If this is true for the high alpine areas, it must be doubly so for lower altitudes.

Snow does fall in Tassie, even to quite low altitudes, but it does not linger. Frosts occur but they seldom persist. Primarily maritime winters are briefer and milder. However, large parts of the eastern UK swing between maritime and continental climates, so that mild spells can be followed by cold ones. I'm sure that Dicksonias can cope with the absolute lows over most of the UK (I can remember a particularly cold December in the High Peaks of Derbyshire when I thought I wouldn't survive, let alone a plant), but several cycles of cold followed by mild weather repeated each winter may be more of a challenge, since unfurling fronds can be completely blackened by an untimely frost. Given that they can cost hundreds of pounds by the time they reach the UK, erring on the side of caution seems understandable.

None of the above means that I don't agree with you 100% when you said people should stop stressing about the plant. But we all do that when something's new and exotic.

I live very near a hill which gets snow cover in winter and we do get frosts down to -7C. Nasty, end of season, up from Antarctica on a screaming southerly, frosts, too. And the D antarctica placidly continues to engulf a piece of old punga stem (treefern) I left leaning against it.

However, climate/weather in the Roaring 40s is a bit different from up north's. Droughts are so far reasonably rare although some regions are suffering them more often (east coast). Long dry spells aren't unusual in parts of Britain and I've been surprised by the low rainfall figures, for all we're told how damp it is. 30" or less doesn't seem very wet to me.

I would ask about the tree ferns in the Aussie interior - what's the recruitment rate? Are they all old plants - or are there juveniles in the mix as well? Just because they're there now doesn't mean the population is viable and robust enough to be there in 50 years - particularly if the plant community is a remnant. If there's only a shsort distance from the middle to the outside, then the buffering effects of the canopy may not be sufficient.

Our tree ferns are often left standing after logging, or remain as a sentiment in a hill paddock. The post logging situation is better. The new trees are planted and all the secondary growth bolts away to give cover within 12 months or less for recovering ferns, Clematis, and subshrubs. Peace for about five years before the first thin and prune, and the ferns keep on growing in the firebreaks and gullies, sheltered by the plantation compartments. Even on the colder volcanic plateau there's good recovery in 10 years, except for the frost hollows.

If anyone is planting out into an exposed site which doesn't have that sort of damp-retaining protection and moderating influence then that ecology has to be developed - or an alternative devised.

I have deep admiration for anyone making the attempt.

Thanks, Jez

On the UK/Tasmania differences, the main threat to Dicksonia in eastern Britain is the occasional dessicating cold, dry east winds from Siberia. When it is cold in Tasmania (and western Britain close to the Atlantic) it is also humid, so dessication isn't a problem.

Resin

The linked article summarises the dilemma fairly accurately. There's a more recent 'Viewpoint' piece by Sir Peter Crane in the Jan '05 edition of 'The Garden' which is much more positive about tree fern trading.

Almost all Tasmanian Dicksonias are exported as a result of the timber industry - mature ferns "harvested" when a forestry 'coupe' is felled. The export is legal, but it does add another income stream to what, even in Tasmania, many regard as a controversial practise (most old growth timber seems to end up as wood chips for export).

Cool temperate rainforest is fairly rare on a world scale; I personally don't feel that anything which adds to its destruction is a good thing.

I think I recall one of the owners of Elizabeth Town Nursery (in the north of our state, and the original source of the Betty Ranicar hellebore), on an earlier Gardenweb thread expressing the opinion that you should look for nuresery-raised specimens rather than anything collected from the wild.

I agree with him. However, given that people will continue to buy them, they should at least be armed with the best advice to keep them alive.

I havent been on this site for a while and have just come back to my old post and found all your very interesting replys.

If I can work out how to do it, I will post a photo of my tree fern so you can see how well it is doing. In May it produced 13 new fronds and it looks fantastic, I love it. I had a tree surgeon come to the house the other day to give me a quote to cut down that pear tree (my neighbour , cut the over hanging branches and now it doesnt produce any fruit and I think it has some kind of disease too) anyway the guy said he thought it was stunning, which was nice.

Here in South East London it got to -5 this past winter and I didnt bother covering the tree fern at all (only because someone told me it was hardy to -10) and it was fine, I havent mulched it yet but I will do soon (been busy with my 3 month old baby) but I did water it lots in the very hot weather we had here a couple of weeks ago (up to 30 degrees for a week with no rain). There is a water shortage here at the moment and a hose pipe ban so it has been hard work I can tell you walking backwards and forwards with a 9litre watering can which was being filled by a tap that has water trickling from it because the water company have turned the pressure down!!!!

I wish I could agree. This year's spring dryness zapped all the fronds on my smallest tree fern, suddenly. One day they were green, next they wire shrivelled, next they were brown! I have since watered it daily and the new fronds are just feelable in the crown, but I live in western Britain and Britain doesn't get much wetter than Devon, and that is still NOT WET ENOUGH!!!!

Planting deeper won't harm the plant, but I don't think it would be necessary (and, given how slow-growing they are, I'd try to retain every expensive inch of trunk that I could). If it's been in the pot for any length of time, that's likely to be a solid mass of roots which will soon grow to anchor it in place.

My neighbour, who had a soft fruit farm near here, used to regard the sporelings as a bit of a weed because of the ease (and numbers) which would sprout from dicarded fronds dropped on the ground. So the spores should do well in the right conditions.

If you look at the link further up this strand you'll see that DA's grow about 12" per decade. Making allowances for the length of trunk likely buried in the ground, yours will be at least 100 years old - maybe a good deal older, depending on how much of it was left behind when it was cut.

A handful of general purpose fertiliser slung into the crown is the usual advice, but I think yours are probably too dry rather than starved. Must be hard to keep them sufficiently moist in a pot.

What kind of fertilizer? In crystal form? That wouldn't burn the poor thing?

The granular stuff you'd broadcast on a flower or vegetable bed. I've used it without it causing any damage - but I couldn't swear that it does more than make me feel better.

"In the past I have been feeding the roots a tomato feed, about one a month in the summer, so should I feed just feed the crown or both?"

I can't recall anyone ever saying that they were gross feeders, so it's just a matter of what's most convenient.

Resin

Richard

I bought a tree once and it did not produce any fronds so I returned it to the garden centre. The following year I bought the same tree fern and it produced some amazing fronds.

Can you please put your hand in the crown and feel for any fronds? If there are mouldy remains then remove them.

I would say give the fern another winter and give is plenty of TLC. I would also use straw, rather than sawdust, to allow more air to circulate and wrap the trunk. The best option would be to keep the fern in a green house over winter to encourage the recovery.

Hope this helps!

I am willing to provide spores to any enthusiast or commercial fern grower to end this terrible trade.

John Dudley

I have no idea if I can post pictures on this site but I have some beauties that demonstrate the reality of tree fern 'harvest' in Tasmania if anyone is interested to see them.

And please don't be fooled by official tags on the fren bodies, it is nothing more than a trick to lend the authority of the state to a revolting and ecologically disastrous trade.

[img src="http://www.website/photoname.jpg"]

EXCEPT use triangular brackets < and > instead of the [ and ] above.

Resin

I can only agree with John. And, since I've seen nursery-grown specimens for sale here in southern Tassie, clearly others do as well.

In about 7 days a small parcel will arrive containing spores of Dicksonia antarctica, Cyathea australis, and Blechnum minus.
I wish you the best of luck with them.

Regards John (Hellebore)

If you have to keep them in pots then water more frequently, directly into the crown until the roots have re-established themselves, and consider increasing the pot size - perhaps with the addition of some water-retaining gel.

Is there anything I can do to save the rotting one? Is it likely to regrow from a lower point? Should I try to remove the crown? Or should I just admit defeat and get a new one?

My question is roughly how long at this time of year in London might it take until the fronds start appearing - the place I bought it from could feel some inside the trunk - I believe existing fronds are always cut off for ease of transport. Many thanks

I cut back all the dead and browned leaves at the beginning of March and soon thereafter I am rewarded with a mass of new fronds which are beginning to burst from the crown, I have to cover each and everyone of them with a 'sack bag' which I bought from my garden center, this prevents the squirrels from digging about in the crown, which of course would mean the fronds being broken. As I look into my gardens now I see a mass of tall splendid trees all around, the effect is most magnificent, oh and they all of them are in full sun without any shade, and they are fine no scorched leaves at all.

Reading some of the posts leaves me bemused, should one or shouldn't one cut back the leaves come winter time? I always leave mine on till the spring the following year, I dare say they will eventually wither and drop off as in their native wild habitat? Any comments are highly appreciated.

With best wishes
Antti
Suomi - Finland, Northern Europe