Category: NATURE

Plants in Wet Places: Moss, Bog and Myre

My favourite book age 9 was a slim volume called “Folk Tales of Devon”. Innumerable accounts peppered its pages of spirits, human and fey, being sucked into the bogs on a trackless Dartmoor. This, coupled with “The Hound of the Baskervilles” a couple of years later, and walking treks in Sutherland with my sister, left me with a deep certainty that if water ever gets over the top of my boots, it won’t stop till I am submerged forever.

Therefore, though I adore them on an intellectual level, and thrill to the spookiness and mystery of moss, bog or myre, it takes me ages – and I mean AGES – to get from one side of an expanse of rush or bog cotton to the other. During which time, I suffer feelings of vulnerability and exposure no normal walker would recognize, and fantasize about nice hard stone paths and causeways.

sphagnumEveryone should leave their comfort zone behind from time to time, though, and if you venture into The Moss there are rewards. It’s called “moss”, because in most cases that’s what makes it – sphagnum mosses of breathtaking colour and beauty, slowly expanding and dying away to leave peat. Mosses are primitive plants dependent on water for reproduction, and you can be sure the brightest patches will be the wettest. Sphagnum holds an incredible quantity of water. Its uses range from wound dressings (it is naturally antiseptic) and hanging baskets to impromptu disposable nappies when walking with babies! Rushes, too, are useful – think matting, cattle bedding and rushlights – and if you can balance on the clumps as stepping stones, they will see you across a wet patch of moor.

In the poor, acid soils of bog lands, you will find pretty, semi-parasitic flowers such as milkwort, lousewort and butterwort, and carnivores such as the tiny sundew, all striving to supplement the mineral content of the soil from other sources. Many orchids have their habitat here. Where you find blaeberries (aka bilberries) growing, it is safe to cross – this plant with its delicious fruits prefers drier slopes. Related species, cranberry and cowberry, will appear on higher moors and myres. Bog myrtle, although happy in the wet, will draw a lot of moisture up, so is also an indicator of safer ground. This is a very useful plant – its aromatic oils are a deterrent to insects – including midgies, allegedly. It’s also called sweet gale – and can be used to flavour Gale Beer. It has a lovely, spicy smell, worth risking wet feet for.

bog cottonFinally, there is the alluring bog cotton-grass – a guarantee of treacherous wetland just waiting to suck you down – but such an unusual flower and how beautiful waving massed in a moorland wind – white woolly standards raised to announce a weird, wonderful and ominously wet world of plants!

 

Before the Chanterelles

In the misty dampness of a cool May morning, the tangled and decaying woodland holds its breath. Falling trees prop up shattered branches and each other, precariously leaning, hanging on by brittle twigs to some semblance of the vertical. Elsewhere, the long archaeology of those that have already succumbed to gravity make the woodland floor uneven, precarious, unpredictable. Some are half-sunken: indistinct mounds of mosses and soft, cushion-like wood, sprouting ferns and small plants – wood sorrel, purslane, chickweed wintergreen – from every crevice. Others, newly crashed in last week’s gale, still carry their leaves, shrivelling, poignant. Between the two extremes, lie trees and logs in every stage of decomposition.

The walker in this wood must learn these stages, and recognise which logs will still make good rafts to lay across the boggy places and ditches she would cross, and which will just crumble when stepped on. She must be aware of what lies overhead and if it would be wiser to go around, rather than under, the hung-up branches. Familiar paths are blocked every month and must be re-routed. New ground is created, explored, and lost again.

Out of the decomposition, new worlds are also born. What is decomposition if not the beginning of opportunity? Spiders re-align their webs in the remaining dead branches of a leaning tree. The breakdown of bark releases nutrients; tree becomes soil, soil claims tree. Single-celled organisms work their way through a sea of bacteria, laying the foundation for others to thrive.

Opportunities are made for beetles that feast on the rot in wood and bark, and the birds and small mammals that home in on the beetles. Shelter, food source, songpost, tunnel, bridge – the creatures of the wood utilise the fallen and falling trees in many ways. On their bodies they bring more soil, seeds, and the elements of fertility to this garden of decay.

And oh, how the garden grows.

It is not death that the walker witnesses, but birth and life. Is this decomposition, or composition? Is it both?  Is this the end of the wood, or the beginning of a new landscape? No human cares much for this wood. Children sometimes come and make fires, camp or build twiggy shelters, but you never see them. There is an old tyre swing, hanging neglected. Someone – no-one knew who – used to make sculptures out of stones in the heart of the wood, but not anymore. Dogs are walked, but usually led straight past the wood now that access is trickier. No-one “manages” it. Change, then, seems rapid. Whole trees crash down, leaving soggy craters and towering cliffs of root-ball, but transformation in nature is incremental, and constant. Each year, the populations dwelling on those bare root-cliffs are slightly different. Ground living fungi give way to aerial brackets, rabbits exploit entrances to potential burrows, liverworts, lichens and ferns take hold.

And underground, fungal mycelia move like whispers within subtle, shape-shifting parameters. Today, a downpour of the night is percolating under the moss-covered banks and logs. Soft spring rain, scarcely visible except when the smirr catches a shard of sunshine, seeps into the soil cauldron, fermenting, bringing new elements, new conditions.

Things move unseen.

Everything waits.

The walker in the woods has seen no mushrooms yet. But even a human animal can smell the contents of the cauldron, the warm, damp changes happening unseen below the wreckage of an unmarked wood. When all the boxes have been ticked, the harvest will be rich and golden.