I found this fern (don't know the species, i live in São Paulo state, Brazil) growing out of a drain and had to remove it before it could damage the drain structure. I decided to try keeping it alive in a pot after removing it. It was a rough transition, since I had to pull pretty hard to get it off.  

Timeline:   

* 25 Aug 2025 – 2 days after transplanting it, I noticed some fronds starting to wilt  
* 27 Aug 2025 – I thought the issue was humidity and almost drowned it  
* 2 Oct 2025 – it had lost all its fronds, so I cut everything back to make room for possible new growth. Since it wasn’t showing any signs of life anymore and I needed the yellow pot for another fern, I pulled it out of the soil to throw it away, but the roots still looked healthy, so I decided to give it one more chance and moved it to a smaller pot  
* 5 Oct 2025 – first new shoots  
* 30 Oct 2025 – some black algae started showing up from excess moisture, so I began watering less often  
* 30 Dec 2025 – I tried moving it to a different spot in the house, but that area wasn’t consistently humid, and after a few heatwaves I noticed the fronds were getting scorched  
* 4 Feb 2026 – I traveled during January and left it in the care of friends, but when I got back in February I moved it back to its original spot, since it really wasn’t doing well in the drier location and the heat made it worse   
* 19 Feb 2026 – moving it back to the more humid spot definitely helped: healthy new fronds started coming in again  
* 27 Feb 2026 – I placed its pot on top of another pot because i needed space  

Sometimes you just gotta believe! My fern recovery over the course of 7 months