Hooky Natural History: Mosses and Liverworts South of Swerford

As winter diversion, the Oxfordshire vice county recorder for plants, David Morris, has teamed up with his counterpart for bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), Oli Pescott, to run field meetings to record mosses and liverworts in potentially interesting parts of the county. There was one yesterday, starting from a farm on the A361 (the Banbury to Chipping Norton road), just south of Swerford. Because it was local I joined, despite knowing virtually nothing about these flowerless plants. Bryophytes are daunting; there are almost 1000 species in the UK, nearly all green, and whilst I have the field guide published by the British Brological Society (plus the rather weighty Moss Flora of Britain and Ireland - Smith), I have found it challenging to get even a foothold. Scientific names are used almost universally; there are common names but they are not in general use, and my knowledge of Latin is confined to a scratchy GCE 'O' level obtained after a resit. I hated it.

We spent quite a few hours in a wooded, wet valley where there were springs coming off the limestone cap. In places tufa was forming. The total number of species found was almost 50. David Morris will provide a comprehensive review of what was found on his blog Oxfordshire Botany, in the coming days

Weatherwise it was awful, with storm Ciara passing through, and it was much too wet to take satisfactory in-situ pictures. So I brought home fragments of a few for which I could remember the names to see if I could work through identification keys to get to a match. Here are a handful which look really neat under the microscope.