Winter Moss Mice
Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
January 12, 2003, issue no. 42
This moss is so insignificant when dormant that it’s functionally invisible. But add winter rain and get brilliant green cushions, sometimes called “moss mice”. This piece, in a retaining wall near my high-rise, does resemble a creature of sorts. It’s an appealing notion that the thousands of moss clumps adorning stone walls, pavement cracks, and roof gutters are actually lurking hoards of veggie mice.
During a winter rain, moss is suddenly everywhere. It’s on the tree trunks and town monuments; it’s covering the soil in my balcony pots, and transforming barren lawn into miniature wonderlands. Picking a single moss photo to share proved impossible, so you get two. Here’s a ground cover moss, shot at sunset just before Christmas in a local park:
Researching this article, I found out that there are 15,000 moss species, 12,000 of them present in the Americas.