Parapolystichum microsorum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Parapolystichum microsorum, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. b Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 187032593

Parapolystichum microsorum, photographed by Joe Dillon — fig. c Joe Dillon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183487287

Parapolystichum microsorum, photographed by Lisa Bennett — fig. d Lisa Bennett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173806905

Parapolystichum microsorum, photographed by Sunita Singh — fig. g Sunita Singh, CC0 1.0 / obs. 146990539

Parapolystichum microsorum, photographed by gnapp — fig. h gnapp, CC0 1.0 / obs. 146533597

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Parapolystichum microsorum, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Chatham Is.	CTM	AUSTRALASIA
New South Wales	NSW
New Zealand North	NZN
New Zealand South	NZS
Norfolk Is.	NFK
Queensland	QLD
Victoria	VIC

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 244 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.8 °C	7.6 °C	10.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.1 °C	21.7 °C	25.9 °C
Annual rainfall	901 mm	1,335 mm	1,907 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	141 mm	249 mm	388 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 244 research-grade observations of Parapolystichum microsorum that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 13 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Aspidium acuminatum var. villosum Bailey
Aspidium microsorum (Endl.) Kaulf.
Aspidium pentangulare Colenso
Ctenitis pentangularis (Colenso) Alston
Dryopteris albovillosa Watts
Dryopteris baileyana Domin
Lastrea microsora (Endl.) C.Presl
Lastreopsis microsora (Endl.) Tindale
Lastreopsis microsora subsp. pentangularis (Colenso) Tindale
Nephrodium baileyanum Domin
Nephrodium decompositum var. pubescens Hook.f.
Nephrodium microsorum Endl.
Nephrodium pentangulare Colenso

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.