Today was the worst kind of winter day; short, sunless and cold. It took a real effort of will to leave home and walk muddy footpaths under drizzly skies, but I was glad that I did.
Everywhere there were signs of vigorous, bright green, new growth in the woodlands beside the river bank.
This is the mosses’ season of opportunity. Now that the tree canopy is bare and brighter light can reach the ground they sprout new leaves and reproduce with structures of exquisite functional beauty. All that you need to appreciate them is a hand lens.
A fallen tree beside the path was carpeted with cypress-leaved plait moss, Hypnum cupressiforme, one of the commonest species. I must have walked past without a glance on countless occasions – it took the bleakness of the winter landscape to draw my attention to it.
The moss’s silky, overlapping leaves were woven into a smooth mat, but what was so fascinating was the forest of new spore capsules I could see through the lens. With their red stalks, a flock of flamingos came to mind.
Some capsules still retained their papery cap, like the upturned beak of a bird. Others had been left tipped with a cone-shaped lid, and these were the most intriguing.
The open mouth of each capsule was fringed with a ring of teeth that tensed and relaxed like claws when I puffed hot breath on them. Minute green spores were just visible, trapped between them. One tremble of the capsule stalk in the wind, or just a little uncurling of those teeth, and they would escape into the airstream.
Further along the riverbank, on a patch of burnt ground, I found bonfire moss, Funaria hygrometrica, growing amid the blackened earth and charcoal. Sooner or later this species always appears wherever soil has been scorched and sends up a tangled, five centimetre-tall, forest of swan-necked spore capsules.
Its spores, like those of all mosses, are unseen but everywhere. It only takes a simple glass lens to enter their miniature universe, beyond the limits of the unaided human eye.
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