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Mosses and Lichens at Home — Part 1

"Children of lowly birth,

Pitifully weak;

Humblest creatures of the wood

To your peaceful brotherhood

Sweet the promise that was given

Like the dew from heaven:

`Blessed are the meek,

They shall inherit the earth';

Thus are the words fulfilled:

Over all the earth

Mosses find a home secure.

On the desolate mountain crest,

Avalanche-ploughed and tempest-tilled,

The sweet mosses rest;

On shadowy banks of streamlets pure,

Kissed by the cataracts shifting spray,

For the bird's small foot a soft highway

For the many and one distressed.

. . . . . . . .

Little sermon of peace."

Willis Boyd Allen.

NO FREQUENTER of the woods can be unfamiliar with the more conspicuous lichens and mosses. It is with them that nature adorns her bare unsightly children. She drapes the timeworn evergreens with gray fringes (see Frontispiece) and decks the old tree-stumps with red or yellow corals. Soft lichens spread over the ground in the deep shade of the pine trees, while pale green or yellow rosettes creep over the fence-rails and the big rocks in the pasture lot. (See Colour Plate II.)

"Far above among the mountains the silver lichen spots rest, starlike, on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years."--Ruskin.

Lichens and mosses are met with all over the world, in the cold North and in the sunny South, in the East and in the West, by the seashore and on the highest mountain peaks. They are the first growths to appear on the rocks and in the places which give no foothold to other plants. When the side of a mountain is torn away by frosts and floods, and the bared rocks, shorn of their forest trees and shrubs, are left unsightly with nothing to tempt other plants to make a home on their ledges, then the lichens come and cover the bared cliffs with delicate traceries and mantles of exquisite grays and greens. They need no soil, a polished rock will meet their need.

"Meek creatures; the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its dustless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and tender honour the scarred disgrace of time."--Ruskin.

The foothold of the lichens is often so insecure that one must exclaim as he sees them, "How do you grow in such unfavourable places? On what do you subsist? No soil! No water! Dry as tinder! Crumbling at any rude touch!" If the plant could answer, no doubt it would say, "There must be pioneers to open up new territory for higher plants, so from the earliest times nature has employed us to do this work. We travel swift as the wind for we travel with the wind. We are fed by the rains and the dews, the hard rocks soften at our touch and give us food."

"The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,

Blackish-gray and mostly wet;

Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke,

See here again, how the lichens fret

And the roots of the ivy strike."

Browning--By the Fireside.

It is true that these little plants as they lie upon the rocks, secrete an acid which dissolves the hard minerals. It is true that they have the power to condense moisture from the air, however little it may be, for they must have water as an item of food and as a medium by which mineral-salts dissolved from the rocks may enter the interior of the plant and may pass from cell to cell to those parts where they are to be worked up into plant food.

The lichens are often the forerunners of rock-loving mosses as without the scanty soil prepared by their chemical action and, without the slight foothold which their debris afford, many mosses would be unable to get a start upon the forbidding rock. With the mosses nature first clothes naked sides of ditches and clay banks and spaces between stubble of hay and corn. These otherwise unsightly spots she covers and makes attractive with a bright green carpet. Even the hard soil along the city pavement or in the tiny city yard she covers with a velvety coat of young moss plants, although they rarely develop further than this velvet stage.

"All green was vanished save of pine and yew,

That still displayed their melancholy hue;

Save the green holly with its berries red,

And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread."

Crabbe--Tales of the Hall.

The blackened embers of the picnic fire are hidden with Golden Cord-mosses (Colour Plate III) and the roadsides in the woods and the slopes to the lake are carpeted with sturdy Hairy-caps (Colour Plate X). The crumbling roofs of deserted cottages and the unused well-sweep and old oaken bucket are decorated with soft tufts of green. Indeed the mosses are lodged in the crevices of the stones which line the well itself and late in the winter when all the world is asleep under its blanket of soft white snow, these little mosses grow and flourish unaffected by the cold above.