Staghorn Fern
Platycerium bifurcatum
also called platycerium
Two kinds of frond doing two jobs — flat shields that clasp and hold, antlers that arch out toward the light.
- Type
- Houseplant · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green · Silver and gray
- Sunlight
- Part shade
- Feeding
- All-purpose balanced
- Frost tolerant
- No
- Mar–Dec Spring Growth
- Jan–Mar Spring Growth
- Plant spacing
- 2 ft 7 in
- In-row spacing
- 2 ft 7 in
- Between rows
- 3 ft 3 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Aerial roots: it does not root in soil at all
- Spread
- 2.5–4 ft across, about 1–1.5× the width of the plant
In the wild these roots grip bark and take water and air straight from the atmosphere, and they suffocate in potting compost. Bark, moss, or a mount with nothing around it is the right footing; a pot of soil is what kills them.
It has almost no root system at all. The flat shield fronds against the mount do the work of holding on and catching leaf litter, and they are left in place when they brown rather than tidied off.
The habit is Staghorn Fern’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Cats and dogs
- Confirmed safe
We say a plant is safe only where a named poison-control reference names that exact species and records it as non-toxic to both cats and dogs. Most plants are on nobody’s list, and their absence here is not a judgement about them. This is a record of what those references say, not veterinary advice, and it cannot account for your own animal, the quantity eaten, or a plant treated with anything.
A separate Platycerium alcicorne entry is a different species in the same genus.
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Hoverfly Syrphidae
Bee-mimicking flies whose legless larvae graze aphid colonies clean while the adults pollinate. A ribbon of shallow, nectar-rich flowers kept in bloom all season recruits wave after wave of them.
- Ladybird (lady beetle) Coccinellidae
The gardener’s favorite ally: adults and their alligator-shaped larvae each eat thousands of aphids, plus scale, mealybugs, and other soft-bodied sap-suckers. Grow flat, open flowers for the adults and never spray a colony that ladybird larvae are already working.
- Green lacewing Chrysoperla carneaHunts Mealybugs
Its bristly larvae — "aphid lions" — impale aphids, mealybugs, thrips, and mite colonies, eating hundreds a week. Adults feed on nectar and pollen from small open flowers and overwinter in hollow stems left standing.
Houseplants, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com