09/12/2026
Gardening for Box Turtles: Native Ferns
🐢🌿🐢
If you’re gardening for Box Turtles, don’t underestimate the value of a good fern.
Ferns create the kind of cool, shady, dense ground cover that box turtles naturally seek out for shelter and protection from the heat. They’re especially useful planted around logs, brush piles, and other hiding places.
The fern pictured here is Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis), one of my favourites for a box turtle garden. It’s a Maryland native that thrives in moist soil and can spread into lush patches of cover.
Other native ferns worth considering include:
🌿 Christmas Fern
🌿 Cinnamon Fern
🌿 Lady Fern
🌿 New York Fern
🌿 Marginal Wood Fern
The key is matching the fern to your conditions. Some, like Sensitive and Cinnamon Fern, prefer consistently moist soil, while Christmas Fern and Marginal Wood Fern are better choices for drier woodland conditions.
When you combine ferns with native flowering plants, logs, leaf litter, brush piles, and other ground-level shelter, you’re creating habitat features that provide respite for this species.
