Moss Green is one of the popular “It” colours this year, so I am told by those who dedicate their lives to telling me how and what to redecorate in my home. Moss Green. Nice. I’ve always been a fan of nature’s spongiest ground cover, I think to myself as I turn the page of my magazine and take a sip of my tea. Then my mind elbows me into remembering just how much I am indebted to moss by replaying a tiny little ‘incident’ from couple of weeks ago.
The memory sees me enjoying a walk through the old neighbourhood next to ours, where the houses are fancy and the streets are lined with mature trees resembling old soldiers on parade. What a beautiful day it had been and wasn’t it good to be alive and able to embrace this special day!
Of course I wasn’t looking where I was going.
Of course my eyes were on the scenery rather than being on the sidewalk in front of me.
Of course my toe caught on a sidewalk stone that had heaved to an alarming height under the pressure that the adjacent ancient tree had applied over time.
I was down before I could even blurt out my customary cuss used for situations like this. One second I was upright, and the next I was completely prone on the boulevard (that no-man’s land between the sidewalk and the curb).
With the opposite foot placement, I could have been thrown in the other direction and finished the maneuver chewing on concrete. Instead, my landing spot on the boulevard was cushioned by a covering of bright green moss. As I rolled around attempting to extricate myself from the tangle of my own limbs, I sputtered a few choice words of criticism to the tree regarding his excessive abundance of strapping roots, but also words of gratitude and apology to the carpet of moss, which would no doubt need to take a beat to recover its breath after the intrusion.
It could have been a lot worse for both of us.
Moss is a very common sight for us here in Vancouver. It is an amazing little plant that can thrive in almost all of the conditions that we have on Earth, and can therefore be found growing on every one of our continents, including Antarctica. I’m told that we have over 800 types of moss in British Columbia, but I have no way of verifying something like that. Most types of moss grow on land, but there are a few that will even grow in fresh water. It loves most moist environments (hence the BC connection), but some versions can also be found in arid spots. Give moss some shade (though some like the sun) and it thrives. It can be as happy growing on the limb of a tree deep in the forest as it would be on a brick wall in the heart of downtown.
The ancestry of moss goes way back to the beginning, and it is considered a living fossil—something that hasn’t changed its biology from the earliest fossilized examples discovered.
Moss is known as a non-vascular plant, meaning that it is a plant that does not use an inner structure to move water or nutrients throughout itself. Instead, moss is able to absorb water and nutrients anywhere on its body, in the same way a sponge soaks up water, and it uses whatever sunlight it gets to make food for itself through photosynthesis. This is why it is categorized as a “simple” plant, botanically speaking. That very appropriate scientific term explains a lot about why this little herbaceous (non wood producing) self-fertilizing plant needs no flowers or seeds but can reproduce using spores the size of dust. It’s simple. That seems like a random way to propagate, but clearly it works like a charm.
Rather than sending out a complicated root system to anchor its plants to a surface, moss uses a series of thread-like hairs (which I suppose on a different scale would describe roots…) that cling to whatever surface they’ve made it onto. The successful growth of moss is not conditional upon finding the right surface to grow on—its survival depends almost exclusively on being supplied with water externally. It can lie dormant for really long periods of time if there is no moisture available, and then almost instantly resumes its normal functioning once it receives water. That little party trick can be very useful in places where rain or moisture is only available during short windows of time.
In nature, moss can be a big help in areas that would otherwise be susceptible to erosion and it adds carbon, that it filters out of the air, into the soil. Often, because it requires so very little from the environment, it is the first of the plants to reclaim an area that has been subjected to a forest fire. Other plants and organisms are then able to use moss to grow on because of the way it provides a base and holds water.
A happy moss is obvious, even to the very untrained observer, because of how it feels to the touch. That sort of spongy soft feeling that we all love (although not enough to let it take over our entire lawns, in most cases) is the sign that the moss is doing well. A healthy cushion or patch of bright green moss can last for years and, through its self-propagation, will slowly spread to cover everything that can’t move out of its way.
And thank goodness for that because without the protective spongy layer that was fortuitously eking out its quiet existence along the boulevard that I found myself sprawled all over a few weeks ago, I might now be a bit of a mess.
Plus, I love the colour.
