Mosses brighten mid-winter days

#Middlebury

The thready structures rising from this moss clump are fruiting bodies produced by female moss plants. Fruiting bodies are filled with spores that, when released, may grow into new moss plants. (Alice Hallaran photo)

By JANINE SULLIVAN-WILEY

By February, I get pretty tired of the lack of color outside. My eyes long for green. I used to think that pretty much the only green we could enjoy mid-winter was that of the evergreens, rhododendrons, and the occasional patch of grass that retained its color.

I was disabused of this notion when I spoke recently with Alice Hallaran, a retired 40-year teacher at Westover who reminded me about moss! You will find lovely green moss along streams, in rock crevices, on live and fallen trees. Mosses form green patches along rocky edges of trails.

There are at least 10 kinds of mosses in the northwest woods (Northeastern Area State and Private Forest Service, U.S. Department of agriculture, www.na.fs.fed.us). Worldwide, there are over 10 thousand different kinds. All of them share the characteristics of being low-growing plants that grow in clumps.

Hallaran, always the biology teacher, explained a bit about them. Her knowledge of biology is prodigious; her enthusiasm for mosses irresistibly contagious.

“Mosses are interesting! You can find them any time of year. Also, something as simple as mosses have such an interesting reproductive cycle, and they’re adapted to so many environments,” she said. She called mosses “the amphibians of the plant kingdom … they need water for their survival and reproduction.”

She said they are tough little plants with their own category in the plant kingdom; they’re Bryophytes. They can extract nutrients directly from rocks. While they require quite a bit of moisture to grow and reproduce, they can tolerate periods of drought. Freezing doesn’t kill them, and they are better at photosynthesis at lower temperatures than any other plant. (Thus their green coloration all winter.)

Once they get water, they are highly absorbent – five times as absorbent as cotton. They were used historically for many purposes, including as insulation in log homes and as a wound dressing – specifically sphagnum moss, which due to its highly acidic nature has antibiotic properties.

Other plants take up water and nutrients and transport them up the plant by means of structures called xylem and phloem (that might be useful someday in a scrabble game); mosses have no such vessels. That’s why they cannot grow past their diminutive stature. Instead of roots, they have rhizoids that simply anchor them to the ground.

Each moss clump is made up of hundreds of tiny male and female plants. Growing close together provides support and helps them retain water to live and reproduce. The sperm in the plant moss needs moisture from rain or dew to swim to a neighboring egg in the female.

Once the egg in the female plant is fertilized, you can tell it’s female by the fruiting body it then produces. You can see fruiting bodies at the end of the thready structures in the accompanying photo. Those fruiting bodies are filled with spores that, when released, may grow into new moss plants.

Next time you’re out along the trails or streams, look for these delightful, tough and useful plants, see how many types you can find, and enjoy the nice splash of green they give us, even in the depth of winter.

For more information on Middlebury Land Trust properties – great places to look for mosses – visit www.middleburylandtrust.org. Contact this writer at jswspotlight@gmail.com.