Country diary:? ?The glittering star of many a lawn

Lightwood, Derbyshire:? Mosses are a wonderfully rich and underappreciated subject - often living right under our noses ?Why is it that we care so little for mosses, except perhaps to kill them? If you Google the words "moss treatment", it gets 200 million hits, but "bryology" - the study of mosses and bryophytes (including liverworts and hornworts) - returns a figure of just 490,000.Even botanists acknowledge, however, that mosses are hard to identify. The excellent starter guide by the Species Recovery Trust, which has been my trusty lantern into this previously shadowed realm, describes mosses as the botanist's "final frontier". Continue reading...