Trebrown Nurseries was the first to introduce this plant into cultivation back in 2001 under its old name of Cyathea loheri, where other retailers now supply our spore and plants using that name. As with most Cyathea sp. their names have had resent revision. We collect our Alsophila loheri spore from high elevation mountain forests on the Taiwan mainland, therefore we regard this provenance as being in the cold-hardier end of the species’ natural range.
Alsophila loheri is an exceptionally rare species occurring on only four mountains in the world, namely, Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Mount Balatukan and Tinagong Dagat in the Philippines and at our collection site on the Jinshuiying mountain ridge, Pingtung County in the South of Taiwan. With of-course our Taiwan site being the most northerly of the four.
In all locations it grows at high elevation, but in Taiwan it grows at an exact elevation of above 1600 m. up to 1660 m. This is cloud-forest, indeed for much of the day the ferns are cloaked in dense cloud, only emerging for a short while on some days. Below 1600 m is dry forest which supports no fern species at all. But at 1600 m it suddenly becomes saturated cloud-forest containing a plethora of different fern species, and a very special place to visit.
This is evidently a very specialist fern and challenging to try and grow in cultivation. It clearly prefers a particular misted environment with equi-distributional cool temperature and high humidity, which might be difficult to reproduce in cultivation.
