This is a very decorative garden fern or container plant. In the garden it must be planted in the semi-shade to full shade. It makes a beautiful foliage plant for a semi-shade spot on patio or verandah.

This fern is widely distributed from southern-western Cape eastwards through South Afric to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Angola, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Zaire, Cameroon and Nigeria. Also on Madagascar, the Mascarene Islands and Tristan da Cunha.

It is commonly found growing in grasslands along streams, often in rank vegetation, on grassy hillsides, along the margins of evergreen forests and quite often on roadsides.

This plant can only be propagated from spores which disperse and germinate to form what is known as the prothallus, which is the sexual growth stage of a fern. The prothallus produces male and female organs where fertilization takes place and a new fern plant grows.

The leaves, known as fronds, are arranged in whorls, and may be rigid. The leaf stalk is up to 300 mm long and glabrous; except for tufts of scales at the base, which are similar to those found on the rhizome.

This plant consists of sterile and fertile leaves. The sterile leaves are up to 1.4 x 0.35 m long. Leaves are elliptic to oblanceolate in outline with the base comprising a series of much reduced leaflets. The leaflet bases are sessile. The margins of leaflets are entire. The texture is thickly leathery. The upper surface is glabrous with the undersurface sub-glabrous with the pale-brown hair-like scales set along the leaf margin.

In B. tabulare the bases of the pinnae are unequally shaped, a character not displayed by the other species.

Ferns are neither Angiosperms (flowering plants) nor Gymnosperms (cone bearing plants). They do not produce flowers, fruits or seeds, but produce spores. They are therefore referred to as Pteridophyta.