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 × wherryi ("A. platyneuron") and mountain spleenwort. In theory, "A. × wherryi" might be found anywhere the ranges of its parental species overlap, stretching down the Appalachian Mountains from New York to Georgia and in the Shawnee Hills of Indiana and Kentucky. In practice, it is quite uncommon and scattered. It has been reported from New Jersey, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Whitfield County, Georgia. The Pennsylvania report consisted of a single plant which grew for a few years at Tucquan Glen. The type locality in New Jersey was reported destroyed in 1956, although "A. bradleyi" was rediscovered there in 1960.