If you gently put your fingers down inside the crown you should be able to feel some new, yet to unfurl, croziers nesting and waiting for a seasonal trigger to tell them when it's time to start advancing skyward. If the crown is void of these nesting little critters then your fern may be in a spot of bother.

What is a "spot of bother"?

A spot of bother is a lot like being in a pickle, but not quite as bad as being up a creek with no paddle.

I grow a few kinds of tree ferns here in the redwoods of California, and one of my Dicksonias looked like it had died after it spent too long shaded under a native spice bush without enough water. The older fronds were still alive, so I was hoping for the best. HoustonPat (a forum member here) suggested that it might come back to life if I fed and watered it to push out new growth. I tried that after I pruned the spice bush that was shading it. The crown wasn't visible and checking for new croziers as bluecable suggested I couldn't feel anything at all in the deep cup that was where the crown should have been.

I've had trouble with granular fertilizer in the past, so now I use a soluable fertilizer, like miracle-gro, at half the recommended strength. It worked, along with the late season rain we had here. Another thing to remember is that D. antarctica has roots growing through the trunk from the crown on down to the soil, so I usually feed the trunk, too. My biggest D. antarctica sometimes has white roots covering the trunk when the weather is not too cold during our long rainy winters in the shade of the redwoods.

I recommend leaving the old fronds on the plant if there is any green on them, as they feed the plant while the new fronds start to grow, even though they may look ragged. Once the new fronds are opened up and hardened off they can be removed, but it's not necessary, and as they get taller I want to leave a thatch of dead fronds partly for the natural look, and partly because I assume they would help hold in moisture so the trunk will dry out more slowly in our very dry summer conditions.

Since it's been a few months since the original post, I hope icklebear can give us an update on his Dicksonia.

TheFreddo

Not to hijack the thread...but I'm wondering if you can tell me a good place to order a Dicksonia from? Thanks and I apologize!