It is only found where its parent species are both present; in practice, this proves to be a few scattered sites in the Appalachian Mountains, Shawnee Hills, and Ozarks, reaching perhaps its greatest local abundance around Natural Bridge State Resort Park.

Asplenium × gravesii is a small fern, whose fronds grow in loosely bundled tufts.

The leaf tissue is of a medium texture (neither delicate nor leathery), with clavate (club-shaped) hairs on the underside becoming gland-tipped, narrow scales on the veins.

The basal pinnae are triangular in shape, roughly equilateral, and nearly heart-shaped at their base;[1] they are borne on short stalks.

Successive pinnae above the base are narrower and less deeply cut, gradually diminishing into fused lobes or overlapping.

× gravesii has fewer than fifteen pairs of pinnae, which are not sessile, and when dark color is present in the rachis, it covers less than seven-eights of that structure.

[c] As this character can only be examined by microscope, and the ranges of individual guard cell size overlap,[3] some care is required in its use; 30 measurements from a single pinna were used to obtain an average length in previous studies.

[5] The first specimens of the fern to be recognized were collected by Edward Willis Graves in 1917 at Sand Mountain near Trenton, Georgia.

[1] Specimens in the herbarium of Harold W. Pretz, collected in 1913 along the lower Susquehanna River and labeled as "A. pinnatifidum", were subsequently identified as the new species.

He supplied both the artificial crosses and live specimens collected at Sand Mountain to Herb Wagner for cytological studies.

[6] Wagner had previously used the size of stomata in herbarium material to tentatively classify the species as a tetraploid.

[7] In 1974, John Mickel published Asplenosorus gravesii as a new combination for the species to allow the continued recognition of the genus Camptosorus for the walking ferns.

[8] Since then, phylogenetic studies have shown that Camptosorus nests within Asplenium,[9][10] and current treatments do not recognize it as a separate genus.

× gravesii might be found anywhere the ranges of the parent species overlap: throughout the mid- to southern Appalachian Mountains and extending west through the Shawnee Hills into the Ozarks.

[13] A. gravesii was produced by artificial hybridization in 1954–1955 by Thomas Darling Jr., who provided a detailed account of the process.

Spores of the two parental species were sown on damp peat moss and kept largely in the shade, except for a few hours of morning sun.

Difficulties were encountered due to aphid infestation and various diseases promoted by excess moisture.