It’s that time of year when the garden is being re-born.

The buds are beginning to burst on the trees and in garden borders, herbaceous perennials are sending up new shoots, gradually filling the gaps in the garden.

To me, nothing says re-birth like the fresh green fronds of ferns slowly uncurling from their tight spirals.

It’s like they’re having a good stretch after waking up from along winters sleep.

Love them or hate them, ferns provide a beautiful softness to any garden and you’ll be hard pressed to find a garden without them - whether they are there on purpose or not.

I’m not alone in my love of ferns. The Victorians were serious champions of my feathery frond friends.

They even built specialist ‘ferneries’ to house them - you can see a great example of one over at Benmore Botanic Garden in Dunoon.

Beautiful and functional, ferns are really useful garden plants. Many are evergreen with really interesting foliage, great for creating structure and texture in the garden.

They are most often associated with dark, damp corners of the garden.

While many species thrive under these darker conditions, there exist quite a few that are happy in damp shade’s hard to please cousin, the dreaded dry shade.

Polypodium vulgare, one of our native evergreen ferns, will be happy in both damp and dry shade under trees, at the edge of a woodland garden or even jammed into cracks in a wall.

It has lovely dark green shimmering fronds and will colonise an area relatively quickly if happy without becoming a nuisance.

Soft shield ferns, Polystichum setiferum, give fluidity to the garden and none more so than those in the Plumosomultilobum group. It has dark green, feathery fronds and at over a metre tall, will make quite the statement.

One of my favourite ferns is Matteucia struthiopteris (even the name makes me smile).

Better known as the Ostrich Fern or Shuttlecock Fern, the fronds of an established clump can reach my height in a season.

It’s slender, upright habit gives it an elegance you wouldn’t expect from a fern.

Blechnum spicant is great for an acidic spot.

It’s another evergreen and although the fronds are pretty tough, I love their “hedge trimmer tooth” shape which will provide year round interest in a damp, shady spot.

Of course one of the most graceful and impressive ferns must be the tree fern, Dicksonia antartica.

A native of Tasmania, it’s half hardy in our climate (the crown needs protection from frost) and plants can be pricey, probably two good reasons it’s a rarity in these here parts.

But I think the recently renovated fernery at Benmore may just be home to a few specimens so get over there.

If nothing else, it’s a great day out.