Plant · P-057

Sweetfern

Comptonia peregrina

Sweetfern is a low, colony-forming nitrogen fixer that works at knee height rather than as a shrub or tree, so it covers ground almost nothing else can fix nitrogen on. Its fern-like, aromatic leaves make a pleasant tea fresh or dried, and crushed leaves or a smoky campfire of the dried plant repel mosquitoes and other insects. It needs real cold and fails once summers turn hot, and it wants sharply acid, sandy, low-fertility ground with no tolerance for heavy or limey soil - once established, it cannot be moved.