It has been continuously damp or wet, it doesn’t make you feel at you best unless you are a moss.
Yesterday on a damp stroll the stand out bright spots were all taken by emerald green moss.
Moss is a non flowering plant , it reproduces using spores . Moss don’t have true roots , they do have stems and leaves.
They need damp conditions to grow and reproduce. The male cells need water to move. Mosses are really fascinating.Mosses and plants called liverworts both belong to a division of plants called bryophytes . In Great Britain there are a thousand species of these bryophytes.
The moss on this walk was mainly on trees.
A quick look in a trusty botany textbook gives a few more interesting facts about moss.
Mosses usually have radially symmetrical shoots with only one type of leaf.
Most mosses have no internal differentiation of tissues.
Mosses produce capsules full of spores.
The capsule has a cap called a operculum.
Spores are shaken out by the movement of the flexible seta which holds the capsule.
We often walk passed our even over mosses. There is lots to learn about them and they definitely deserve a closer look.
NATURE TABLE EXPLORER 