It grows on calcareous rocks, and has small, finely-divided leaves with a leathery texture, dark axes connecting the leaf segments, and a heavy coating of white powder on the undersurface.

[2] It bears thin[3] linear to lanceolate[4] brown[2][5] to reddish-brown[4] or chestnut-brown[3] scales, of a uniform color and with entire (toothless) margins.

[3] It is 3 to 12 centimeters (1.2 to 4.7 in) long[4] and 0.75 to 2 millimeters (0.030 to 0.079 in) in diameter,[5] making up about one-half to one-third of the total length of the leaf.

[4] They vary from narrowly to broadly deltate (triangular) in shape,[7][5] and ranges from tripinnate (cut into pinnae, pinnules and pinnulets) to pentapinnate at the base, where it is most divided.

[3] Leaf segments are numerous and closely spaced, small,[3] elliptic to ovate[4] or roundish to oblong in shape.

[12] Both Edwin Copeland and Charles Alfred Weatherby suggested in the 1940s that a group of ferns related to Notholaena nivea might represent a distinct genus of its own.

[13][14] Weatherby thought that, until that genus was described, the group might better be placed in Pellaea, rather than in Notholaena, but died in 1949 before he could circumscribe and publish it.

Accordingly, in 1950, Conrad Vernon Morton transferred the species to Pellaea as P. limitanea, to provide a name for it in Thomas Henry Kearney's Flowering Plants and ferns of Arizona, and reduced the subspecies to a variety.

[15] John T. Mickel, following Copeland's opinion that Notholaena was best lumped into a broadly defined Cheilanthes, transferred the species there as C. limitanea in 1979, also treating the subspecies as a variety.

[16] The recognition of the N. nivea group as a genus was finally addressed in 1987 by Michael D. Windham, who was carrying out phylogenetic studies of the cheilanthoids.

[19] In 2018, Maarten J. M. Christenhusz transferred the species to Hemionitis as H. limitanea, as part of a program to consolidate the cheilanthoid ferns into that genus.

[21] The two subspecies are genetically distinct, and believed to be of independent allopolyploid origin, through the hybridization of sexual taxa not yet discovered.

[7][5] Both subspecies grow on rocky slopes and cliffs, composed of either calcareous or volcanic rocks,[7][5][4] although A. limitanea subsp.