Ferns are a narrow category here and worth being straight about. This is high desert. The air is dry, the light is intense at this elevation, and most of the ferns people picture come from woodland with humidity we do not have.
What that leaves is a real but short list — the ferns adapted to dry shade and to rock, and they are genuinely useful in the one situation nothing else solves well. North side of a house. Under a deep overhang. The shaded gap between a wall and a fence. Those spots defeat most flowering plants, which need light to do anything, and a fern does not need light because it is not trying to flower.
What they do need is consistent moisture at the root and shelter from wind, and in a dry spring here that means supplemental water on a schedule rather than whenever somebody remembers. They also want organic matter in the soil, which our ground does not supply, so a fern planting is one of the few places where amending the bed is genuinely the right answer.
Used where they belong they are the best texture available in deep shade. Used as a general landscape plant in this climate they disappoint, and we would rather say so here than after you have bought them.