C. dickieana is native to Canada and the United States, a variety of European countries including Russia and also north Africa and the Andes.

[1] The first recorded discovery of the plant was made by William Knight, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen in Scotland.

Dickie also sent a live specimen to Robert Sim, a nurseryman from Kent, who believed it to be a new species and published his views in the 1848 edition of the Gardener's and Farmer's Journal, naming it C.

Various opinions have been published over the intervening years, with a consensus that C. dickeana was a separate species emerging in the 1930s, although recent research suggests that Moore's caution may have been appropriate.

[1][4] C. dickeana has broader, less divided and more closely spaced pinnae than C. fragilis and the spores of the former are typically wrinkled and ridged rather than the spiny form of the latter's.