Polystichum setiferum.

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P. setiferum AGM (E) soft shield fern Hight/Spread 80cm or more. One of the best of all garden ferns, very hardy and with no failings. It has fine, delicate looking, slightly stiff foliage, and always makes a good specimen anywhere in the garden. It has given a huge number of first class cultivars, too many to list here without leaving out many good plants.

‘Wakeleyanum’ (Shown).has narrow elegant fronds with short splayed pinnae on the sides.

There are a number of really good cultivars in the 'Plumosum', (meaning feather like.) group, including the well known cultivar 'Bevis' (Shown), which also exhibits charmingly slender tapering ends to its fronds. The 'Plumosum' group is often combined with the 'Multilobum' group to make 'Plumosum Multilobum'.and taken together they produce some of the most attractive garden ferns there are, often sold as the 'Mossy Shield Ferns' they make foaming mounds of fine textured foliage, which always find plenty of ready buyers in the nursery. There are also several good crested forms, and ‘Grandiceps’ is impressive, but to my mind a little ugly. There is also a dwarf form called 'Congestum' which grows to 25cm, and does not seem to suffer many of the failings usually found in dwarf forms, being a good easy to grow garden plant.

All the 'Divisilobum' Group are charming, and have even more finely divided foliage than the type, a number of good new forms from Germany including 'Dalhem' (Shown) and 'Herrinhausen' fall into this group.