Nephrolepis obliterata
Nephrolepis obliterata is a tough, upright sword fern from northern Australia, New Guinea and the western Pacific islands, best known in the trade as the 'Kimberley Queen' selection. In the wild it forms colonies on shaded rock faces, granite gullies, creek banks and rainforest margins, and even grows at the edge of crater-lake sedgeland, so it copes with a wider range of light and dryness than the Boston fern. Treat it as a warm, bright-shade terrestrial fern that likes steady moisture but not a waterlogged pot.
Where it grows wild
Herbarium records from Queensland describe it on shaded rock faces and in rock cracks on islands, in lowland mesophyll rainforest gullies, among granite boulders in rainforest gullies, on creek banks in deep shade, on sandstone escarpment shrubland and emergent at the edge of a crater lake. It is colony-forming, spreading by stolons, and fronds reach about 60 cm or more.
Mostly lowland: Queensland specimens come from near sea level to about 400 m, with the Atherton Tableland crater lakes (around 700 m) near the upper end. Exact limits for the Pacific populations were not checked.
🔒 Growing it like that
The wild conditions above, turned into targets for a shelf, a tent or a greenhouse. The full profile has:
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Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, used under its CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, unmodified.