Not many of us go around looking hard at mosses, yet they are everywhere, and there are hundreds of different species. It has to be said that it is not easy to tell one from another, and I hasten to say that I am far from being an expert. In fact bryologists, who is what these experts call themselves, are much thinner on the ground than the tiny plants that fascinate them.
At this time of year these lowly plants come briefly into their own, as they start to grow, and have their ‘flowering and fruiting’ season. Flowering and fruiting I have placed in inverted commas, because they are not so advanced as the higher plants we are so used to see, and technically they do not flower and fruit, as you and I know it. But with the aid of a magnifying glass these tiny plants may be seen as every bit as beautiful, spectacular even, as their relatives. Instead of seeds they reproduce by means of dust fine spores, and these are often borne on stiff stems that rise above the plant, thousands of them held in a capsule at the tip. As they ripen the capsule becomes a burnished golden brown in colour, and with the lens a line of weakness may be seen encircling it. When fully ripe this line tears open to catapult the spores into the air. Being so light they drift up into the atmosphere, even up in to the stratosphere. They are capable of turning up literally anywhere on the planet, and this is why some mosses have a very wide distribution on land.
Some of the best mosses to look at are those on a roof or a wall that look like tiny cushions of velvety-green. When their fruiting capsules first appear they are pale green, fragile looking, and almost translucent, but gradually they darken and harden as they ripen. A dozen or more kinds of mosses may easily be found on an old wall, along with lichens of different colours, ferns, and higher plants with airborne seeds that have lodged in crevices where enough soil has collected to allow them to germinate. As I said putting a name to them is not easy, though many of us are content to admire their beauty, and their tenacity in thriving in such forbidding-looking places.
The mosses and ferns, in terms of life on earth, were not always small plants to be found mainly in out of the way places. Go right back towards the beginning of plant life on land, and relatives of both groups soared skywards to a height of up to thirty or more metres. In fact for millions of years they were the dominant plants on earth, forming vast impenetrable forests. When their lives ended and they toppled earthwards they formed layers hundreds of metres thick. In levels of very low oxygen their remains became fossilised to form the coalfields, on which we depend and are so busy mining today. Burning them has released the carbon, which they had locked up in the ground, and which has become one major source of pollution today. When will we ever learn?
[May I ask you, dear reader, if you have visited the expanded picture gallery on our website lately? I think you will be pleasantly surprised to find there are hundreds of pictures, and the number is growing almost daily, from our library of thousands. Eventually we aim to have them all on the site. Of course we hope you will find some of them attractive enough to buy, but we are happy if you just enjoy browsing through them]