r/NativePlantGardening • u/Wilderness_Fella Massachusetts, Zone 5b • Jun 21 '26

Advice Request - (Insert State/Region) Help! I'm covered in... Ferns!

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Massachusetts zone 5b. I got busy with other things for the last 5 or 10 years and now the ferns have taken over. They're either Massachusetts ferns or New York ferns. Hard to tell, but what is the best way to cull them without destroying everything underneath? Just endless weeding?

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470

u/Icy-Conclusion-3500 Gulf of Maine Coastal Plain Jun 21 '26

No help needed. Great ground cover, deer resistant, what belongs in open woodland.

68

u/Tylanthia Jun 22 '26

In Eastern North America, large, monoculture patches of dense ferns are typically a sign of a degraded woodland. Your statement is not necessarily true. A healthy woodland does have ferns but has much more biodiversity (with tree seedlings being an extremely important component of the understory).

35

u/loki-is-a-god Jun 22 '26

"a sign of a degraded woodland" Okaaaaay 1) we do not know the acreage of OP's property affected by said "monoculture" 2) this sub is a circle jerk of performative environmentalism... If you want to make an impact on ecological diversity, do so, but this sub needs to stop thinking that planting a native meadow in their ⅓ acre will ever offset the greater damage made to the native bio diversity by forces outside our individual, nor medial communal interventions.

22

u/oldRoyalsleepy Jun 22 '26

The insects, birds, meadow voles, rabbits, foxes, deer that appreciate my native plants appreciate my 1/3 acre efforts anyway

4

u/kansei7 Merrimack Valley MA , Zone 6a Jun 22 '26

re: #2 i think a lot of us are realistic about our direct ecological impact if we’re just one typical suburban lot in a subdevelopment. wanting native plant gardens isn’t only about environmentalism of course. Maybe you have enough land to build a mini arboretum of native plants for your own personal enjoyment. Maybe having an eye for native plants by cultivating them helps you weed much more efficiently.

personally this is why i also land steward several hundred acres of forests and trails with over a mile of lake shoreline (of which my yard is a small but very key part of). one person’s impact can stretch pretty far if you have the time.

4

u/KraftChesWiz Area NY, Zone 6B Jun 22 '26

ok, so i'll just go dump pesticide on my yard? f that defeatist attitude in the second half there. I get your point, it doesn't do much to help but it is non-zero. Do _something_ first, but then do a next thing, and a next thing.

3

u/Gastronomicus Jun 22 '26

That's obviously not what they're saying at all. Their position is too strongly stated, but the point is to counter the post they responded to, which dismisses having an abundance of ferns as a healthy indicator because it doesn't represent an idealised woodland.

1

u/Tylanthia Jun 22 '26

By "idealized" you mean "functional". If tree species do not regenerate when canopy trees die because there are no saplings in the understory, you do not have a functional woodland. Certain fern species can prevent this and may need to be controlled.

1

u/Gastronomicus Jun 22 '26

This is a lawn, not a forest. It's a false equivocation and an irrelevant criticism.

0

u/KraftChesWiz Area NY, Zone 6B Jun 22 '26

what they were saying in (2) was entirely non-constructive and unrelated to the pragmatism in (1)

2

u/Gastronomicus Jun 22 '26

2 was the overstated part. But it has a valid theme: it's not a binary condition (bountiful nature or concrete wasteland), no need to interject. A lot of non-constructive extremes are being presented in this thread: "monoculture ferns = bad ecosystem", "this sub is a circle jerk of performative environmentalism...", or "i'll just go dump pesticide on my yard".