Killed my fern by accident in a weird way last month

I was in Denver at my cousin's place and tried to save their dying Boston fern by moving it closer to the window. Turns out that window gets direct afternoon sun and the leaves got scorched in like 2 days. I felt so bad I went out and bought them a new one from a nursery on Colfax. Has anyone else tried to help someone's plant and just made things worse?

4 comments

4 Comments

pat7811mo ago

I was just reading about how plant leaves basically have a memory for light exposure, and ferns are some of the most sensitive to sudden changes. @jadej50 is right though, trimming the crispy bits is a good move. I heard on a gardening podcast that when you move any plant from low light to bright light, you gotta do it gradual like over a week or two. My aunt killed a fiddle leaf fig doing the same thing to it last summer. She just wanted it to get more light and within three days the leaves had these brown dry patches all over.

carter.joseph1mo ago

pat781's aunt probably overwatered it too honestly

jadej501mo agoTop Commenter

Oh man, scorched leaves are the worst. I did the exact same thing to my neighbor's peace lily last year. Moved it from a dim corner to what I thought was a bright spot and within a week the whole thing looked fried. A good rule for ferns is they want bright indirect light, so near a north or east facing window is best or pull them back a few feet from a south or west one. You probably already know this now but trimming off the crispy parts helps the plant focus on new growth instead of trying to fix dead bits. Did your cousin's fern bounce back at all after you moved it back?

willowg8812d ago

All due respect but I gotta push back on this whole idea that plants have some kind of memory about light exposure. That's just not how plants work at all. They don't have brains or nervous systems so they can't remember anything, it's just biology and chemistry happening in real time. A leaf that adapted to low light just physically doesn't have the right cell structure to handle direct sun all of a sudden, it gets scorched cause it literally cooked, not cause the plant remembered something lol. Trimming dead bits is fine but you're mostly just making it look better, the plant was gonna dump those leaves anyway once the damage was done. People put too much human emotion into plants honestly, they're just growing where conditions let them grow and dying where they don't.