Goldie's Woodfern Dryopteris goldieana
Goldie's Woodfern is a fern native to Canada and the lower 48 states.
More about this plant
Dryopteris goldieana, commonly called Goldie's wood fern or giant wood fern, is a fern native to the eastern United States and adjacent areas of Canada, from New Brunswick to Ontario and Georgia. It is the largest native North American species of Dryopteris and along with ostrich fern it is one of the largest ferns in eastern North America. Specimens are known with fronds six feet tall. D. goldieana hybridizes with many other species of Dryopteris and the hybrids tend to be larger than the pure species. It was named by William Hooker in honor of its discoverer, John Goldie. The epithet was originally published as goldiana, but this is regarded as a misspelling to be corrected. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~3 caterpillar species
Dryopteris supports ~3 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Dryopteris in North America, including:
Related plants
More Dryopteris →
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (15) Open & cited
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