Platycerium bifurcatum (elkhorn fern)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Platycerium bifurcatum, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. a Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-31 / obs. 202364408

Platycerium bifurcatum, photographed by Jade Fortnash — fig. f Jade Fortnash, CC0 1.0 / obs. 194101061

Platycerium bifurcatum, photographed by Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan — fig. h Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 191558189

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 Platycerium bifurcatum, 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
Jawa	JAW	ASIA-TROPICAL
Lesser Sunda Is.	LSI
Sulawesi	SUL
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Norfolk Is.	NFK
Queensland	QLD
New Caledonia	NWC	PACIFIC

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 2,014 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	4.8 °C	10.4 °C	20.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.2 °C	26.3 °C	30.7 °C
Annual rainfall	888 mm	1,259 mm	2,519 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	97 mm	180 mm	345 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,014 research-grade observations of Platycerium bifurcatum 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 10 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.

Acrostichum bifurcatum Cav.
Alcicornium bifurcatum (Cav.) Underw.
Alcicornium vulgare Gaudich.
Platycerium alcicorne var. lanciferum (Domin) F.M.Bailey
Platycerium alcicorne var. subrhomboideum (Domin) F.M.Bailey
Platycerium angustatum Desv.
Platycerium bifurcatum var. bifurcatum
Platycerium bifurcatum var. lanciferum (F.M.Bailey) Domin
Platycerium bifurcatum var. normale Domin
Platycerium bifurcatum var. subrhomboideum Domin

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.