Miniature Gardens

I'm still fiddling around with various ways of photographing the very small and today's photograph of moss reminds me of a miniature tropical garden. Though mosses are one of the most primitive plants some of them bear a striking resemblance to bromeliads, plants that evolved much later.

Wonderful

After yesterday's promise to try to identify the plants in my photos, I have to confess I have been unable to find out what this mushroom is called. I need to find some good field guides so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. As for the moss, I'm pretty sure we're looking at a species (one of the 350 or so) of sphagnum.

Mosses and....

I selected today's pair of rather junky photos to illustrate something I'm just beginning to realize: I usually ignore anything I don't "know" and since I don't "know" most of what's in the environment, I generally ignore most of what I see. I originally selected the photo above in order to write a little about moss because the forest around Thetis Lake is luxuriously coated with mosses. (When I took the photo I was thinking only about the stream, surrounded by some green and brown areas....) The closer I looked at that big glob of moss the more I realized that there were actually three or four different kinds of moss growing there, not just one moss. When I started to look more closely at some of the other photos I'd taken that day, like the one to the right, I realized it's not just a photo of some orange mushrooms. There are at least three kinds of moss, a green slimy fungus and four or more different kinds of lichen. Some, like the strange coral-like lichen in the upper right corner are even more interesting than the subject of the photo - that dramatic pair of orange mushrooms. So, while I can't promise to identify everything I photograph from now on, I'm going to try, since it is a good way of beginning to see clearly. How many of the plants in today's photos can you identify?