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OKANAGAN NATURE NUT: Marching into moss season

Columnist looks at the miniature world of this interesting plant
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Roseanne Van Ee

Okanagan Nature Nut

March is a wonderful month to enjoy moisture-loving moss.

Snow melt, moist air and ground awakens moss from winter slumber.

Turtle Mountain, BX Creek, Kal Park and trails with rocky outcroppings beside lakes are marvellous places to observe moss waking up in March.

Mosses are bryophytes; the most primitive land plants. They’re without flowers, fruits, seeds, roots or a vascular system to conduct water internally.

They are the most simplest plants of leaf and stem, yet elegant. Approximately 22,000 species have evolved worldwide to inhabit tiny niches in virtually every ecosystem.

Lacking a support system, they’re small. They fill in cracks, grow between plants, are epiphytic on trees, and succeed where other plants can’t - on rocks, cliffs, bark, etc. They’re the amphibians of the plant world; the evolutionary first step toward the terrestrial life between algae and higher plants.

They need moisture to breed and supply microscopic nutrients to grow.

But moss is extraordinarily resilient to dehydration and can become desiccated for many years and still survive once water is replenished. Most mosses turn shape and change colour when they dry out but return to full vigour only minutes after wetting.

They grow in extremely packed, intertwined, dense colonies to hold water like a sponge. And their leaf shapes hold water too.

They’re often growing in moist, shady areas of the forest. The type of chlorophyll in their leaves is fine-tuned to absorb filtered forest light.

So you’ll find rich carpets of moss in dark, moist evergreen forests. But deciduous forests’ fallen autumn leaves smother moss. So here they grow on stumps, logs and rocks above ground.

The tiny upright mosses trap air movement or breezes along the moist ground. With so much decomposing in and on the ground, there’s lots of carbon dioxide – the feed for photosynthesis. Mosses reproduce with fertilized spores encased in capsules on long upright stalks. The powdery spores waft in the wind away from their thick parental carpet. But mosses can reproduce asexually too by breaking up and cloning like many other plants.

Knowing mosses enriches our knowledge of the world. So slow down and look closely as moss patterns emerge. Some look like feathers, ferns, tufts, fluff, and even electrified cat’s tails – that’s the honest-to-goodness real name of a common B.C. moss. So few mosses have common names because so few people take notice to intimately observe them. But you can!

Next time you’re hiking, take along a hand lens. Or, if you’re birding, your binoculars make a powerful magnifier by looking in the wrong end with the eyepiece close to the moss. You’ll be surprised!

The excellent Lone Pine guide to Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia has a useful scientific key to help identify many of our common mosses. Some of their common names are fun to learn. And for a wonderfully entertaining and informative story about moss get Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of the renowned Braiding Sweetgrass). Our library has it.

So, head out this spring to enjoy the miniature world of moss!

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Jennifer Smith

About the Author: Jennifer Smith

Vernon has always been my home, and I've been working at The Morning Star since 2004.
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