Moss as a discipline
On giving up on a difficult fern guide and starting, instead, with the mosses — and what came back.
I had a fern identification guide for two years that I could not really use. The guide was technical, beautifully made, and required the kind of attention to fronds and sori and rhizome morphology that I did not, in practice, ever bring to a forest walk. I would carry it in the small backpack on Sundays and I would mostly leave it there.
Then last September I bought a small guide to the common mosses of Western Europe, and within two weeks I was identifying mosses on every walk. The mosses were easier. They were also, it turned out, the right entry point into a slower kind of seeing.
Why mosses are a good first practice
A moss is small. To identify a moss you have to crouch down or, more often, lie on your belly. You have to put your face close to the ground. You have to look at the moss with a hand lens, which I now carry on a string around my neck on walks. The act of identifying a moss is, fundamentally, the act of becoming very still and very low.
Once you have spent a few minutes flat on the forest floor looking at a moss, the rest of the forest looks different when you stand up. The lichen on the bark is suddenly visible. The very small flowers between the moss patches are suddenly visible. The architecture of the lower forest, which is mostly invisible at standing height, becomes a place you have been.
The eight common ones
There are about eight moss species that turn up on almost every walk in the forests near here. Common haircap, which forms thick green carpets on damp soil. Pincushion moss, which grows on rocks in small dome-shaped clumps. Big shaggy moss, which is the one that looks like a tiny forest of its own. White-tipped moss, which has the white sporophyte tips that gave it the name. Plait moss. Yew-leaved feather moss. Rough-stalked feather moss. And the one I still call by its Latin name because I have not learned the English, Polytrichum formosum.
Eight is enough. With eight you can identify ninety percent of the mosses you encounter on a normal walk. The other ten percent become the small puzzles you bring home and look up later, which is a separate kind of pleasure.
If you have a difficult plant guide that has defeated you, try mosses first. The mosses will retrain the eye. The eye, once retrained, can handle the harder guides.