Fern Wall Art

Fern Wall Art

Light does more to a fern image than to almost any other botanical subject, because the whole thing sits in a narrow band of green and shadow. In a bright room with direct sun, the mid-tones open up and you can see the individual leaflets along each frond. In a north-facing room, or after four in the afternoon, the same print closes down and reads as one dark mass with a shape in it. Neither is wrong, but you should know which one you are buying for.

That is why the background matters more than the plant. Ferns set against a pale ground — bone, chalk, soft grey — keep their structure in poor light because the contrast is doing the work. Ferns on black or deep green look magnificent under a lamp and turn into a rectangle of gloom on a shaded wall. If the wall you have in mind is dim for most of the day, take the pale ground.

Good examples show you the architecture: the way a frond repeats itself at smaller and smaller scales, the tight spiral of a new shoot before it opens, the slight asymmetry where one side has grown faster than the other. Weak ones flatten all that into a decorative green squiggle, or blur the edges until you could be looking at any leaf at all.

Because the subject is a single vertical growth, tall formats suit it and repeat well. Three narrow prints of different species in a row hold together better than one wide fern image, and they let you fill an awkward strip of wall beside a door or between two windows.

Take a photograph of the empty wall at the hour you are usually in that room, and look at how grey it comes out. That grey is the light your fern print will actually live in, and it is almost always darker than you remember it being.