Friends in low places

As special as orchids, as beautiful as bluebells and as important as oaks, our ground-hugging mosses are worth a look down, says Mark Cocker

- Mark Cocker

IF people were asked to name the most important plants in the British countryside, my guess is many would choose something special, such as the ultra-rare lady’s slipper orchid. Or perhaps bluebells for those hazy pools of azure that float through many woods in spring, hardly occurring elsewhere in Europe. Others might opt for a more enduring expression of the national landscape, such as an oak wood. If so, then note that you will have to queue up with the Germans, French, Estonians and Bulgarians, to name a few, who also have oak as a totem tree.

The likelihood is that most won’t opt for my candidate: moss or, rather, mosses, so this is a good place to explore the extraordinary contribution they make to our world and to these islands in particular. A friend recently expressed surprise that there was more than a single type of British moss. There are actually 763 species and this doesn’t capture their full diversity.

Mosses belong to a set of organisms known as the ‘lower plants’ or, more technically, as bryophytes. There are three main plant relatives in the group—mosses, liverworts (294 species) and hornworts (four species)—and, in total, we may have about 1,100 species. That figure represents nearly two-thirds of all those in Europe (our flowering plants, by contrast, represent only one- sixth of the continent’s total). Britain is, therefore, bryophyte heaven, with a higher diversity than almost any other country.