MEDITATIONS ON MOSS
BY BERT SPINKS
I have taken a detour in the wet forests of the Blue Tier, having overshot a cairn on a track that is both roughly marked and rarely walked. Suddenly, I am plunged into a tunnel of green, nestled in a gully that seems to have been gathering moisture for years. A welter of branches leans over this damp, verdant landscape. It seems the sun hasn’t paid a visit for a long while. Every surface is covered with moss.
To meditate on moss is a way to enrich any bushwalk in Tasmania. Not all environments are the mossy wonderland of this north-east gully, but moss is pretty much everywhere. Each individual plant is a miniature story, simple organisms expressing complex forms. And although they appear fragile, they are astonishingly resilient.
Though mosses produce no roots, wood, flowers or fruit, they have evolved into thousands of forms over the course of millions of years and thrive in a wide range of conditions all over the globe. The more I learn about them, the more often I turn my eyes to them as I walk.
If you focus in on a patch of Tassie rainforest, you’ll likely count more mosses than any other type of plant. Leaning in, here on the Blue Tier, I see the familiar spiky forms of star moss; pipe cleaner moss with soggy leaves on long red stems; mats of feather moss, as if a flock of rosellas has dropped all their down. The skinny stems of papillaria hang down like the nets you see on neglected tennis courts.
To mull on moss is also to muse on the deep history of a place. Their evolutionary lineage can be traced back to some of the earliest terrestrial plants, which made a bold leap from an aquatic existence to life on the land long before the Carboniferous Era.
Mosses are able to stake a claim on a wide range of surfaces. They are often pioneer plants, establishing themselves in unexpected locations. Most of us have seen mosses growing in the cracks of pavement. Certain species seem to refurbish old jack jumper nests to use as their home base and some thrive on bones scattered throughout the bush.
One of my favourite moss species, Tayloria octoblepharum, has a different preference: it likes to grow on animal scat. It has sticky spores that are carried by flies between deposits of faeces on the forest floor. Some people call it ‘poop moss’. It is always heartening when life grows out of shit.
Moss will, in turn, create habitat for other species. It makes a comfortable bed for certain seeds and supports the next stage of growth in the forest. By trapping organic debris – dust, leaf litter, dead bugs – and transferring nutrients from the air to the ground layer, the moss begins to make soil.
Insects and other tiny creatures live amongst the mosses’ minute leaves and networks of mycelia entwine with the fibres of the plant. This moss-world may be, in a sense, a symbiotic community: it’s been shown that some insects who make the moss their home are also responsible for transporting moss spores around the forest floor.
I should admit that plant biology sets my head spinning. It’s hard to comprehend all the activity that goes on in a busy forest like this; I can become particularly cross-eyed when I try to mentally reconstruct the microscopic magic of moss procreation.
I peer closely at a circular patch of pincushion moss that grows like a spongy green scab on a blackwood trunk. From this patch, tan-coloured stalks throng, sticking up like the antennae of beetles. On the end of each of these is a thin capsule, a long oval in which spores are stored.
It is through these spores that mosses mostly reproduce. It’s a nice thought to imagine that if I gently brush the sporophytes I might, in some way, be participating in the creation of more pincushion mosses.
Though moss is a land-based plant, its life is still inextricably linked with water. That’s why all these mosses are so happy here in this moist gully. Moss leaves must be wet for them to photosynthesise, and their spores need to be damp for the sperm from male mosses to swim to the females’ eggs. And because they have no roots – mosses are fixed in place by a heap of hair-like strands called rhizoids – they must get their moisture directly from their substrate, which is why moss won’t thrive where there’s not enough water.
It’s also a reason why mosses are often communal: a cluster of individual moss plants is better at holding water. Scattered throughout Tasmania, you will find bogs made from one of the more well-known moss species, sphagnum moss. These raised, brightly hued beds form impressive mounds where the moss has soaked up huge amounts of water. Very little drains out; what accumulates beneath it is peat, as acidic as pickling brine.
Despite these plants’ reliance on water, a dry moss doesn’t immediately die. Instead, they go dormant, putting their biological processes on pause. Some species can remain in this state for years, reviving themselves when moisture appears again in their environment. It has recently rained here in the island’s north-east and after some dry months, it’s nice to see moss looking happy and healthy.
The artful array of mosses in this gully will stay close to my heart for a long time. Rejuvenated by winter rain, they appear to have become muscular. They stand tall, puffing out their chests as I retrace my steps back onto the ridge to find the next cairn, likely covered in moss too, and back to the trailhead.
When I get back to my car, I notice a green blotch on the panel on one of the doors. Unbeknownst to me, moss has also made its home on that unlikely surface. But how can I even think to scrape it off now that I’ve had a close look at the splendour of such a plant?
Bert Spinks is a Tasmania writer, poet and bushwalking guide who tells stories about our places and the way we live in them. You can more of his musings on ecology and travel over at his Substack account: storytellerspinks.substack.com
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