Country Focus
Moss Day
Thanks to our somewhat damp climate, Wales is home to a staggering 850 different species of Bryophytes, representing three quarters of the total number (which is 1100) found in the UK as a whole. Bryophyte is the collective name for a group of plants that include mosses, liverworts and hornworts. This year the British Bryological Society is celebrates its hundreth birthday and has a variety of activities to mark the centenary, including designing a number of moss trails at Treborth Gardens in Bangor; the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Carmarthenshire and also one in Harlech, Gwynedd. It's there Pauline Smith explores the wonderful world of bryology and goes "mossing"!
- Duration:
- 29m
- Broadcast on:
- 25 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. If you're taking care of a senior loved one, then you know it can be hard. Remember, it's OK to ask for help. There's a reason why 29 million families have turned to Care.com. Experienced senior caregivers can help with everything from meal prep to taking your loved one to doctor's appointments. And every caregiver you hire is background checked. So important for peace of mind. Find full time, part time, or even occasional help that fits your family schedule and budget. Get the support you need with Care.com. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right, we're cutting the price of Mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes in detail. Hello and welcome to Country Focus, I'm Pauline Smith. Thanks to our somewhat damp climate, Wales is home to a staggering 850 different species of bryophytes representing three quarters of the total number found in the UK as a whole. This week, the science and the beauty of moss. So do we have here an ash tree absolutely plastered with lots and lots of different mosses? It's like a mat of green, it's very soft to touch. Yes, sorry, I probably shouldn't be stroking. No, no, it's very, very tactile, you definitely should be stroking it. Well, we've come to the coastal town of Harlech, a town steeped in history. It is on the coast of the Cardigan Bay within the western edge of Arreuri National Park. And Philippa Thompson is a volunteer with the British biological society and Vice County recorder for the neighbouring Kanavanshire. A lot of this is a moss called Hypnam, which will be growing everybody's gardens all over the UK, all over Wales. You'll find it growing on your walls, on your trees. But the thing that we're looking specifically here is can you see some little patches of moss that are sort of sticking out from that very smooth carpet of moss? Yes, they're like little tufts. All of these mosses we call epiphytes because they're actually growing on the trees. It means that they're getting all their nutrients from the water that's falling on the trees. They don't have roots, they're not taking nutrients from the ground. And this particular thing is a little thing called Ulota Philantha. His other name is Frizzled Pin cushion. And when it's dry, it's all curled up. But at the moment, we've had rain overnight, so it just sticks out from the tree. And if you look at the very tips of the leaves, you can see tiny little brown dots. We call them Jimmy, they're little vegetative propagules. And so the moss will reproduce by letting these little brown propagules get taken off in the air, they get washed off by the rain. And if they find a suitable place somewhere else, then they'll grow elsewhere. You'd have to have a keen eye to be able to see those little brown spots. Now, let's before we go any further. Briar fights is the umbrella term. What do we mean by Briar fights, Philippa? Right, we have three types of Briar fights. We have mosses, which I think most people are familiar with. We have mosses growing in your back garden. We also have liverworts. There are almost as many liverworts as there are mosses. They have a slightly different structure. Mosses grow with leaves growing in a spiral around the stem. Liverworts have different reproductive structures. They also have a very different structure to the actual plant. And there's two kinds. There are some liverworts that are like little cushions. And there's leafy liverworts and these are little symmetrical plants. So there'll be a stem up the middle and a row of leaves on each side. They're incredibly diverse structurally and very beautiful, actually. But they are so tiny that most of us have never ever noticed them. So you can't start to appreciate them unless you look at them with a hand lens. Look at them with a microscope. Or indeed, in this day and age, get your smartphone out and have a look through the macro function of a smartphone camera. And it's just amazing what you'll see. Suddenly, this thing that looks like green fuzz comes alive with all these different shapes and structures. It's an area of botany that they're described as lower plants, but they're quite of high value, presumably. The most important thing about them is they are adapted to deal with incredible unpredictability. So a lot of the species are adapted to dealing with drought, getting no water at all. But they also grow in such a way that they can still photosynthesize when there's lots and lots of water. The result of that means that bryophytes colonize. They are quite often the first things that appear in new habitats. So they're incredibly important for formation of soil. Well, we're here in Haalec on a damp summer's day. Dodging the showers, hopefully. But presumably, this is the weather they like. Oh, it's absolutely perfect. And here in Wales, we do have an exceptional number. Is that because of our climate? Absolutely. It's the fact that we get quite a lot of rain. And also, because we have the influence of the North Atlantic Drift, which means that the west coast of the UK is quite a bit warmer than the east, we get the full range of species. Down the west coast of Wales, we will get species that are right at the top of their range, that are actually Mediterranean species. But then we can go back into the middle of Uriri. And at the top of the mountains, we will find species that are relics of the Ice Age, that are actually at the very southernmost range of the Arctic species. So we have this incredible diversity. Well, we're here on a trail. It's 100 years since the British biological society was established. And this trail is part of those celebrations. Yes, indeed. We've also been working with National Botanic Garden Wales to do a moss trail down there. And a moss trail up at Traborth Botanic Garden in Bangor. The plan is on the 21st of October, which is National Moss Day. These trails will be open for the first time. Botanic gardens is an obvious place, but why harlech? The reason is that one of the people that was a mover, a founder of the British biological society, was a man called Daniel Angrich Jones, who was headmaster in harlech and used to take the children out on Briar fight walks, showing the mosses and things. And the British biological society evolved from this wonderful society called the Moss Exchange Club. I'm Jim Maxwell, I'm Secretary of the Harlech Library and Institute. My name is Sheila Maxwell, I am the Treasurer. And we had an inquiry from a member of the biological society, which intrigued our interest. And so we started looking further into Daniel Angrich Jones, because we were doing a project on the residents of Harlech, who have had in notable achievements. And the more we looked into, the more we came intrigued by him. Although he was actually born in Liverpool, he moved here at the age of one. And he went through all his schooling here, well speaking. He then moved on to be a teacher and he subsequently moved back to Harlech as head of the local primary school. He had a great interest in the local greenery and flowers and so on. And he, in fact, published a book as part of the steadfast submission on the flowers and the ferns of the local area. But he became, across a fellow teacher, who persuaded him that bryophytes would make him more interesting study. And so he then explored the surroundings and eventually set up the Moss Exchange Club. This was in two sections, the Beginners and the More Specialized. The Beginners section then had more members than the Specialized section. So he set about rationalizing the organization and formed the British Biological Society and he became the first secretary. And some ten years later, present as a society. This is Parp-Pronograig, it's owned by Gwyneth Council. It's a park right in the middle of Harlech, away from the castle. The thing that captured my imagination was this image of the local headmaster taking his children out on these walks to identify plants. And when we had a grant from the Snowdonia National Park to look at the cultural issues in Harlech, it just seemed such an obvious thing to do. There is a need, I think, much more for children to be out of school and out of technology. And when we met Philippa, well, that was it. Something that everybody else can enjoy and hence the trail. And indeed, our trails, and there are several of them here, we are trying to take people away from the castle and to show them that in Harlech, there is far more to Harlech than a big castle. Philippa, how long is this trail? It's just a very short walk round. Yes, we can see it from here, so we're probably talking 200 metres in total. And how many briar fights? Nine. There are loads more briar fights here, but we were selective to try and find things that it was reasonably easy to pick out. Let's have a look at the wall down here. This stone wall will regularly get completely baked. Sometimes it might go for weeks without any rain. And yet we've still got these little green plants. Just find crevices of all the stone work. Yep. If you look at it very closely, you can see that each leaf has got a long white hair point on the end of the leaf. These hairs are the feature that allows this moss to deal with the fact that it's spending so much time being completely dried out in the sunshine. Because the hair tracks the moisture, but it also acts as a sunshade. Everything is designed to draw the moisture onto the plant. I mean, here we've got at least five, six species just on the top of the wall here. There might be more. They're just beautiful, beautiful things. And we just don't look at them, just tear them out. So I think they're very, very precious. Now, some of these mosses come and go in terms of our knowledge, and not on the trail. There is a rare moss here in Harlech that's been refound. Yes, indeed. I run a group called the North Wales non-flowing plant group, and we were invited to go and visit a private garden. We spent the morning looking at mosses, and then we had lunch in this very, very beautiful conservatory. And looking through the glass, we saw a little patch of moss that intrigued us. When we went out to have a look at it puzzled us slightly, it was one of those we needed to put in a little paper packet and take home and look at under the microscope. It turned out to be a thing called Filinotis Rigida, it's also called apple moss. It is a Mediterranean species. There are a few records from Cornwall and just a handful from Marianneath. One of the historical records was a record by Daniel Angeth Jones that he made 100 years ago. The description is Harlech, but he doesn't say whereabouts. So we don't know, but this Filinotis Rigida might have been growing in exactly the same place 100 years ago, and Daniel Angeth Jones might have been there and might have spotted it. How fitting to have rediscovered it now? It was very exciting. Now this is the little beast that everybody tries to pull out of their lawn. And one of the things that I love that we're now starting to think about wildlife gardens is that hopefully people will be a bit more sympathetic to the mosses that they find growing in the lawn. We're under a maple tree here to see lots of greenery, but your eyes are in there. Yes, this is like a little fern. It does like a little bit of shade. Sometimes you get great big carpets of it in the woods. It's a thing called Suidium Tamariskinum, Tamarisk moss. And it really does look like a miniature fern, really symmetrical. It's very pretty. I mean, it's not much bigger than your thumbnail. And again, if you look at it under a lens, you see amazing little structures. It's all a magnificent, beautiful bit of architecture. Sometimes when I go out looking for bryphites, I may spend half an hour or more in just one place, and the more I look, the more mosses I find. And they're all different shapes. They've all got different structures to them. Are they all mosses here in Hallek? Or is there a liverwort at all? We do have a liverwort. We've got a thing called Metzgeria Foucata, forked veil wort that grows on a tree trunk. We also have a thing called Frillania dillitata, dilated scale wort. But a lot of the liverworts require a slightly more moist environment. Well, we're now at Koid Flunach, a national nature reserve. And it's, well, it's one of the jewels in the crown, really, of our habitats environments. We're by the side of a great ravine. We've got some very, very mature trees. We've just come past some enormous oak trees. We're seeing more mosses than grasses or anything else almost. Everywhere feels quite damp, quite moist, just dripping with life. This is Welsh jungle. This is the equivalent of the tropical rainforest, except its temperate rainforest. An incredibly species rich. Yes, the amazing diversity of briar fights. We have amazing diversity of lichens. There are a number of very rare protected liverworts that grow here. There's a very beautiful rare moss called somata phillum, a golden silky moss that's also protected. Now, we've walked up the path, and as you say, we did pass. Mosses, carpets of them. Spagnum moss is the most familiar I know of. Yes, Spagnum, the place that we're really associated with, is boggy areas. And they do require quite acidic soils. And these are mainly oak trees. This is quite an acidic woodland. And the Spagnum is just growing underneath the trees, because there's just so much moisture around. And are there other mosses that I've walked by? Well, there's all sorts. There's hypnom, ritidia delphus, lorias. There's isostheosium myosoroidis, which is carpeting the tree trunks. Little liverworts. There's things called plagiokyla, and they have little tooth leaves. I really hardly know where to start. There's just so much. Dare I say, you're a biologist. Do you have to be a little bit nerdy to be interested? You have to be incredibly nerdy. We spend a lot of time on our knees. Peering through our hand lenses, we take things home in little paper packets and spend hours looking at them under the microscope. We then send specimens to each other and talk about them for hours and hours on end. Yeah, it's massively geeky. What got you into this? Because I think you're an opera singer by profession. I was originally, yes. It's a whole new world. Once you start looking through the lens, the more you look, the more you see. So you're very much involved with the science of recording and studying of these. But we're here in a forest, and we're accompanied by a couple of artists. How does that work? Well, something I'm incredibly aware of is that our data is utterly worthless if the public at large do not value the thing that we're looking at. There's so much in the natural world that is just so, so beautiful. And one of the ways that I thought we could spread some of the wonder of this micro world would be by trying to explore people's creativity and the possibility of using these forms as inspiration. That has put me into contact with a very inspirational pair of artists who are just about to put on an exhibition called Moss Garden. I'm Noel Griffiths. I'm an artist who lives in Hannibal. And I'm Kim Atkinson, also an artist, and I live at Aberdallon, which is at the far end of Pendleton. Kim and I have been working together, responding to the landscape for 13, 14 years. We've made a very ambitious, very large scale it book about the sound of birds. So when we came to make a concertina book a response to a piece of music by David Bowie, which is called Moss Garden, it was returning to something we've done before. And we decided to come to Kane Atlenek, which is close to where I live, and is one of the most important designated Celtic rainforests, to look more carefully at moss and liverworts and to create a folio, which is a mixture of paintings, prints, and text. And would take three pieces of paper each out each season to the woodland. And we decided that for spring, for example, Noel would paint a liverwort and I would paint a moss. We also painted the sounds we were hearing, and the landscape view of the bit of woodland we were sitting in. Then we homed in on our selected species of moss or liverwort, and we painted it in its situ, and then gathered a tiny sample, which later we painted in the studio. So we had the whole thing from sound, landscape, and microscope paintings. When our first process would be to mix paint, gouache paint, watercolor, and acrylic paints, and we'd have four rather arbitrary, actually, pots of paint, so they had a sort of color feel for each season. Aren't they just greens? I think we had everything except green. Some samples to show you. With lovely evocative names like Smoke Grey. We definitely didn't want to paint exactly what we saw. Kim actually has a bright red there, which you wouldn't expect. No, but you see, that's part of the fun of painting, is that you don't know what's going to happen. And so even when we're sitting in the landscape, which as you say, it's completely green, we just interpreted it with different colors, and then when we're looking through the microscope, well, I don't come from a scientific background at all, so I really just interpreted it. As I would if it was a still life, you're really understanding, finding out what you're looking at. Now, it's a bit of a wet day, so we didn't bring any of your paintings with us, but you do have a copy of some of the text, is it? Well, I've just got something I put together for autumn, where I was looking at the liver word, which is the pizania. Pizania trilobata. And this is what we put into the folio. Blue and golden day, the far hill glows apricot with a perfect dome of blue sky above, on the path leathery brown oak, and yellow birch leaves fallen. And the sound paintings that we made, we've included these words, sound of water flowing, chainsaw, constant from the farm, robin ticking, blue-tipped pipes up, a wren overhead jets. And we kind of felt it was really important to be honest about what we were hearing, because it's very easy to select and not hear the chainsaws or the car doors banging, but they're part of life, and canine clinic, a really important Celtic rainforest, is right next to the hydroelectric scheme. At the top of the valley, there's the nuclear power station, so we're living in the 21st century. We have all those sounds. This is your liver work now. Lovely, my bizania. Let's have a look at it. The bryophyte you are talking about there, Philippa, has found us. Yes, indeed. It's called bizania trilobata, because it's a liver work. But when you actually look at the leaves, they've got three little points, and the trilobata actually refers to the three lobes, trilobata. But I think of it as being a bit like a trilobite. It looks a bit like some sort of weird arthropod that could come from the film "Alien" or something. When I wrote about what I was looking at through a microscope, I said magnified it is complicated, like a spine with vertebrae, and overlapping petals and curves. So it's not far off. This is going to be part of an exhibition in Mohanclith. Yes, Moss Garden is the title. It's going to be on a mama, which is a very lovely independent gallery, and it's on until November the 4th. And we're hoping it will go to other places. Philippa, we've been pretty positive about things in terms of mosses and their successes, but they are under threat. They're under massive threat. We don't know what the future holds in terms of climate change. Some mosses are incredibly good colonizers and can move very, very easily and very quickly. Other mosses are relics that are probably growing in the same places that they have been growing since the last ice age. And that's one of the things that makes this wood so valuable. It is a steep ravine. There's a lot of this hillside that will never, ever have been managed. So there will have been a forest cover for millennia. Another big threat is nitrogen pollution with all the inputs to agriculture, all the exhaust fumes from vehicles and so on. There is an increasing problem with increased nitrates in the water, but also nitrates in the air as well. And there has been an observation that a lot of quite valuable moss habitats are disappearing under algae. Change is inevitable. No habitat is ever static, but these sort of changes are becoming more and more widespread. A third problem, it's absolutely wonderful that we've got such initiatives on tree planting and creating new forests. But it's also incredibly important that we plant the right sort of trees and we plant them in the right places. A woodland like this, it is really, really important that we don't introduce vegetation that comes from the wrong places, particularly we're losing our ash trees because of ash dye back. There's a threat to our oak trees from sudden oak death. So yes, the threats are enormous and we have to do all we can to conserve them. I said at the beginning, we had a 850 species of mosses here in Wales. Have we lost some though? But it's difficult to say they're slowly declining. We continue to find new species simply because we have people looking at things in the laboratory and working out the genetics. And you find that something that we thought was one species, actually a three different species, it's just that they look quite similar. But, undoubtedly, we have lost individual species over the last century. I was privileged a few weeks ago to spend a day with a biologist resurveying mounted mosses right up under the top of Carne Fluellen, under the top of Glidivar. We were looking at records that were made in 2015 to see if the mosses were still in exactly the same place. Some of them are still quite healthy, but there were several that we did not re-find. And we don't know what's going to happen over the next few years, but it's not looking good. But you said earlier that they're actually quite adaptable. A lot of them are. So we won't lose moss. But there's a good chance we're going to lose quite a few of our more unusual species. This is a limestone wall. And not the top is covered. With a carpet of a rather large and luxuriant moss, this is Samnebrian alipocurum. I've got here a single plant. You can see it looks very like a little tree. And if you look closely at each of those stems, they're branched. And they have a lot of leaves. And if you would look with their hand lens, you would see that they were pointed and they have some little teeth on the end. My final stop on my journey to look at mosses brings me to treborth botanic garden on the Menai Strait just outside Bangor. Treborth botanic garden is a wonderful place for mosses. As you can see, we're completely surrounded by mosses. Here I'm joined by Sue Graham, who's a volunteer at the gardens and with the British Briological Society. So we have a trail here which goes through the woodland between the garden and the Menai Strait. There are 10 sites where the people can really see the structure of the moss. And also find out just how many different kinds there are. We had a survey done here in 2011 and there were 101 different species of mosses and liverworts that treborth. The moss day would be on the 21st of October and we're hoping that it would attract a lot of people to come. And of course, once people start to look at them and see their structure, they will also see how beautiful they are and how worthwhile it is to just take a bit more notice of them, to really look when you're walking through the woods. There's something like 34 British species. So all these little cups on the floor here contain examples of some of the different British sphagnum mosses. So the different colours, the greens, the browns, the reds, the different sort of structures, leaf shape. There's a lot more to it than just an ordinary sphagnum green moss covering a bog. I've stepped into the carnivorous plant house and here is... I'm Kamla Bauer and I volunteer at Treborth Botanic Garden and I look after the carnivorous plant collection. There are a lot of them are associated with the peat bogs but down near the Venus fly traps that everybody knows about and they are difficult to grow in anything other than peat. And with this band coming up on using peat in garden compost, we're now looking for alternatives and one of them is to actually grow them in chopped sphagnum and they do actually grow quite well. Well, sphagnum moss itself is an interesting plant and I think Philippa Thompson, you're going to be showing these specimens to the public on National Moss Day, is that right? Yes, we feel that sphagnum is such an important species. Now, you're on the committee for the British Biological Society. You're celebrating 100 years. It's quite a small society, really, isn't it? We have a membership of 700. Our membership extends across the world but the active biologists in Britain and Ireland, there are comparatively few of us and the whole idea of National Moss Day is just to try and draw more people in. So, let's hope we keep going for another 100 years. Well, yes, but that's it from here at Treborth Botanic Gardens. Thanks to all my bryophyte guests from me, Pauline Smith and the Country Focus team, happy National Moss Day. Hey, it's Nora McInerney, host of the Head Start Embracing the Journey. This is season two and if you're new here, these are real conversations with real people living with chronic migraine. This is a show that creates a little more space for empathy and understanding around asking questions and asking for help. So, don't wait, jump into the conversation and learn a little more about life with chronic migraine. Listen to the Head Start embracing the journey on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to podcasts.