L ike light, and tell you what they like: Ferns are finicky about light; read their colors.
The one you purchased, perhaps because its lushness impressed you in the shop, yellowed up at your place. Reach for the fertilizer? Check for pests? Maybe. But more likely the plant’s simply sitting where it doesn’t like. Its shade of green isn’t right for that corner of the room. Treat all fern greens as the same and you’ll lose some plants. Learn to read the tone of each species’ color, and you’ll save them.
How to Read Your Fern’s Color
It divides familiar houseferns into families they come in by color. So you don’t guess at what’s normal anymore.
A good Boston fern is a soft, matte medium green. Chartreuse? It’s probably unhappy because it doesn’t get enough light. Maidenhair ferns, however: Not so much. Their naturaly color may be pale yellow-green. When people look at their ferns and see paleness, they assume there must be something wrong. They think it is deficient. But they don’t know that some species like this one really are supposed to be apple-green. It takes knowing the difference between healthy-pale and sickly-pale. Then you can succeed.
Another giveaway is the sheen. A Bird’s Nest fern should of been a glossy emerald green. When it loses its shine, chances are the room’s humidity has decreased.
Staghorn ferns are in a category all their own. Because the shield fronds are brown and have a gray-green tint, many people try to fix them as if the plant is dying. Wrong! It’s just getting older. Brown shield fronds occur naturaly as part of the plant’s life cycle. Again, knowing what’s old versus what’s stressed help you avoid needless intervention, according to the infographic.
Saturation is probably most dependent on light quality of all factors. Thinning chlorophyll (due to low light) pushes the green toward yellow or olive. The best combination is depth of color from bright indirect light without scorched delicate edges.
Compare the colors in the grid above. Blue Star ferns like bright indirect light to hold onto their glaucous blue-green wax bloom. In deeper shade, they lose that cool color. But leatherleaf ferns holds their dark forest green in dim corners. While one fern fades on my dark bookshelf, another flourishes. Why? Because each plant has its own natural light preference. Match the plant to the light instead of just pointing it at a window.
Sometimes it’s just new growth that fools you. Coppery Autumn ferns flush again in springtime then go deep green. Rose-silver paintbrush accents add color to the fronds of new painted ferns. Fretting when autumn ferns transition from copper to deep green? That’s just normal seasonal growth.
You might end up burning the roots. Think it needs more nutrients because it’s not greening up fast enough? No, it’s nitrogen failure, and fertilizing more will only further damage the roots.
The chart teaches you to recognize such repeating changes as natural progression. It rates the darkness of green, from one to ten. At a light three, there’s maidenhair. A dark nine: leatherleaf. There is no more guessing game about whether your plants are too light or too dark. Just look up their desired number.
Less is more: A fern’s care involves fewer hard-and-fast rules than other plants, though there’s an element of knowing what to look for, too. Look at it. How does its color match what you know should be normal for its species? Tweak the conditions until they do. It’s a subtle dance between you and the foliage. Your ferns will appear happier when you learn to accept and read their different natural colors.
True: There’s no such thing as the Right Green. It’s a continuum of signals telling you how healthy (or otherwise) the plant is.