Home / Plants / Grow / Sensitive fern

Sensitive fern

Onoclea sensibilis · Onocleaceae

Your local evidence lens

Separate evidence questions, never one approval badge

Set a ZIP to compare this record with state distribution, native range, USDA hardiness, and invasive records.

A genus split is not a placement verdict. Set a ZIP to read the local documented split.

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence: Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions: No test or rating condition is normalized.
Fire ecology context: No section-reviewed fire-ecology context is normalized.
Placement evidence: 0 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions: British Columbia; Wisconsin / western Great Lakes
Maintenance: No sourced horticultural maintenance assertion is normalized; fire-test conditions do not supply maintenance advice.

Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source

Firewise Landscaping — A Guide to Protecting Your Home from Wildfire · Official scoped edition
- WI; partial normalized coverage · 2009-02-01
  Wisconsin DNR and UW-Extension co-published this Wisconsin guide, which the current DNR property-preparation page still links. FireApproved publishes 21 exact owners from the profiles and shoreland table. The co-publication is one lineage and does not establish site suitability.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in AL, AR, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, VA, VT, WI, WV, WY.
Native range: The legacy compatibility field lists WI in native range; its field-level source was not retained.
Introduced / established: No introduced or established row is normalized; that does not prove native status.
USDA hardiness: No hardiness value is normalized.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

Legal-list status: Set a location for an exact legal-list result; source silence is not clearance.
Seed-list status: Set a location to compare the separate state noxious-weed seed layer.
Reported invasive here: No ecological invasive report is normalized; that does not prove noninvasiveness.
Broader regional context: Aggregate AK, HI, and L48 evidence is shown only as regional context, never as an exact-state finding.
Federal context: Federal designations remain separate from state legal-list results.

How to read this page

The status above is computed from the cited rows below: independent recommendations can support a fire-resistant result, an avoid row can produce keep-away, and disagreement stays visible as conflict. Placement notes preserve each source’s own scheme rather than translating unlike rules into one scale. This is evidence about a plant, not permission to plant it in every part of the defensible space; Zone 0 remains noncombustible.

Sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis) — Photo: (c) Steven Lamonde, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Form: perennial
Legacy native field: WI · field-level source not retained
Grows in: AL, AR, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA +32
Rated in: British Columbia; Wisconsin / western Great Lakes
Family: Onocleaceae
Evidence: 2 cited sources

The evidence

Grouped by what each source concluded. Primary evidence rated the plant itself (a lab, field program, or original curation); corroboration compiled or republished another source's rating and resolves to its root lineage.

Last verified 2026-08-23. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · ITIS

Onoclea sensibilis (Sensitive fern). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/onoclea-sensibilis/. Last verified 2026-08-23.