hey folks welcome to our exotic garden here on the north end of salt spring island it is the xviii already I think it's the 18th of of June of April and what you're looking at here is that dick Sony Antarctica our tasmanian tree ferns so this is last year's fronds the Crozier's are just starting to emerge now the knuckles out of the center of the crown of this tasmanian tree fern dick Sony Antarctica and a lot of you people would like to grow this plant and there's a trick to growing this plant the key is not to let the center of this tree fern freeze the most tender part of this fern is the center crown where the closures emerged that's where the fronds come out and unfurl so this this plant here gets no protection on the fronds the fronds as you see here are laid out right through the winter time green it does stay evergreen here year-round but what I do is I put burlap fold it up and put it on the inner crown and I also put bubble plastic over top of that and then I take an upside-down plant tray and I flip that over top and I put a piece of wood over it just so nothing blows out if we do get some wind it doesn't blow the bubble plastic out or the or the burlap I'll grab the camera in a minute and I'll show you what I mean so you can spend a lot of money on these things and you get a really bad winter in a cooler zone and if it freezes in the inner crown I don't care if your tree fern has 10 feet of trunk on it it will die so the most tender part of the tree fern is the inner crown the second one's cold Rd part are the bronze these will Brown and around temperatures just below 20 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 6.6 and the trunk is probably Hardy to about minus 9 degrees Celsius or minus 10 degrees Celsius but the inner crown does not like a lot of heavy frost so this this plant here will unfurl two dozen new fronds at a time and they're just starting to show now the knuckles little later this year for some reason last year they were already coming out in March but this year they're a little later and when they come out they will be about eight foot in length and it puts on a quake the quite the amazing show so what I do at the end of the summer these older fronds from last year will start to brown and I clip them off and then just leave the new flesh of frogs so this is attractive carpets for two and I growing beside it we have a lot of those in the garden so this growing in an alcove where it receives full Sun hot Sun and it doesn't bother it at this latitude we're at 48 degrees north latitude so we'll go up into here there's the trunk it's got six feet of trunk on it and what I'm talking about is here you can see them coming out there the knuckles are showing that's where you want to protect on a tree fern right in there so lots of burlap you could put straw in there cover it up with plastic to over top of that even if you keep it dryer that's a good thing but don't let that get heavily frosted or frozen that's that's a real problem it's frozen so a little bit of frost one hurt it but a killer freeze will definitely hurt it I've seen big ones out in the Fraser Valley south east of Vancouver freeze and they had 8 feet of trunk on them just because the people that bought them did not know how to look after them so and you water it from the top to this whole trunk is made up of roots so you water the tree fern from the top and we water this religiously in the summer months every day so I planted that in April 1994 so it's been there 24 years now and it does really fine in this climate there's some really nice tree ferns on salt spring island nursery down the road from us sells a lot of them this one was actually imported directly from Tasmania in September 1991 alright try one in your own garden folks if you live in a similar growing zone thanks for watching