Asplenium listeri Asplenium listeri Asplenium listeri, commonly known as the Christmas Island spleenwort, is a species of fern in the Aspleniaceae family. It is endemic to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the north-eastern Indian Ocean. Its specific epithet honours British zoologist and plant collector Joseph Jackson Lister, who visited the island on in 1887 and was the first to collect a specimen. The spleenwort is a small, terrestrial, lithophytic fern with shortly creeping rhizomes, and with fronds up to 90 mm long held in a crown. Found only on Christmas Island, the fern is known from a very small number of
Asplenium platyneuron result of long-distance dispersal, which may also have allowed it to colonize and naturalize in South Africa. While globally secure, ebony spleenwort is considered an endangered species in some of the states and provinces at the northern and western edges of its North American range. NatureServe considers it to be critically imperiled in Arizona and Colorado, imperiled in Nebraska, Maine, Rhode Island, and Quebec, and vulnerable in Minnesota. The ebony spleenwort is sometimes grown as a terrarium or garden plant. It can be cultivated in sandy peat, subacid garden soil, other gravelly, sandy or gritty soils, or potting mix under