Phlebodium decumanum
A large lowland tropical American polypod fern with thick creeping rhizomes covered in golden-brown scales and tall, deeply lobed blue-green fronds. In the wild it most often grows as an epiphyte on palm trunks and large trees in fairly open, warm, wet lowland forest and savanna edges, and it handles brighter light and short dry spells better than most tropical ferns.
Where it grows wild
Epiphyte on palm trunks, tree bases and fallen logs, occasionally on rocks, in lowland rainforest, gallery forest, palm swamps and disturbed open woodland. Its rhizomes creep over the bark surface in pockets of humus.
Mostly lowland: recorded from sea level to about 2,460 m, but the median record is only 190 m, so treat it as a hot lowland plant.
🔒 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 4.0 licence, unmodified.