Diario de mossy

The stress of finals week has hit me and I was too sick to get out into the woods this week, so I stumbled out into my front yard and got to know some of the mosses in my yard just a little bit better.

I love the Dicranum that grows on my old Douglas-fir stump, so I took a picture of it first. Then I moved over to my camellia bushes and took a picture of the psudeoscleropodum moss growing there. Then I stumbled into my driveway and took a picture of the bryum argentium growing in my car. On the way back in I took a picture of a mystery moss growing on cinder rocks under my rhody.

The air was cold and the sky was overcast. People outside where playing football and whooping it up in Spanish. Then the rains came, I went inside and the soccer players went home.

Now my fingers itch from touching my yard shrub that I have named Jabba the Hut. I don’t know what it is but I need to get someone to cut half of it down because it caught on fire last year and the top half is dead and unsightly. But whenever I touch that shrub I get a rash.

It was nice to meet some of the mosses in my yard this quarter, there are still many mosses in my yard that I have not identified. It might be a fun project to survey my entire yard and record what bryophytes I find.

I still have a cold and am not up to doing a big hike this week so I walked around town. It was raining very lightly when I walked out my door at about 11:30 am. The Bank of America was my goal but on the way I found some nice cushion mosses on the ledge at the Cornerstone building. The Cornerstone building is next to the food bank and folks were starting to line up on the sidewalk to wait for food. I made them a bit nervous with my camera so I only took a few pictures of the moss before I left.

I really wanted to go to the Bank of America and check out all then neat mosses I saw growing on the ledge, but when I got to the BOA I saw it was open and I’ve already been told off once for taking pictures there so I gave it a pass.
After leaving BOA I headed over to the Shelton history museum to take a look at the Atrichum undulatum that I found there last week. Then I saw something that blew me away and I wondered why I had not seen it the last time I was at the museum. What I saw was a large carpet of Marchantia polymorpha.

Marchantia was covering most of the flowerbeds on the west side of the building. I found both gemme cups and budding antheridiophore. I spent some time admiring this liverwort, taking pictures of it and looking at it with my hand lens and this attracted the attention of a senior citizen whom I recognize by sight but not by name. She recognized me too. I think she is a volunteer at the museum.

She wanted to know what I was up to, my behavior seemed quite puzzling to her. So told her I was studying bryophytes and I showed her my prized liverwort and she said “oh a moss” I told her it was close to a moss but it was actually a liverwort and it was the first time I have ever found it. She seemed to be happy for me. She then gently advised me “well if you want to find that you should go to the rain forest”. I explained to her that I had been looking for it in the forest, but it turns out that this liverwort is a greenhouse weed and that is why I never found it in the forest. So we both had a good laugh about that in the now pouring rain. The rain was really starting to come down at this point so we parted ways and I headed back home with my prize.