I was working in my gardens the other day and decided to transplant one of the native sword ferns to a shadier area by the waterfall. But once I got it in the ground I notice something unusual.....one of the fronds had divided into two at the tip and each tip was growing fairly normally. Has anyone else ever encountered this before?
Individual fern plants are pretty adaptable to damage, and that's likely what happened here. Something caused it to cleave.
For what it's worth, there's some ferns with selected cultivars where every frond splits like this at the tip. I've never thought they looked very nice, but apparently they were all the rage with 19th century fern enthusiasts.
This little fern is "wild", offspring of a much larger wild sword fern that has been growing in the yard for at least 15 years; I wanted to move the little one to a better place and just happened to notice its unusual feature once it was in the ground
