Spanish moss

“ All the glowing growth of the forest seems locked and interlocked together, as though the sons of the wilderness were engaged in a wrestling match, trying which could first uproot the other from the ancient soil. Now we face a phalanx of veteran oaks, clothed utterly, and their green boughs hidden, beneath mantles of beautiful Spanish moss ”

“ Plots of flowers vie with each other to put forth the most beautiful colors; all nature seems to be doing its utmost to show its gratitude for being assigned to this beautiful spot. Far back in the forest, is a smooth, level place, where moonlight picnics are often held. The soft drapery of Spanish moss hangs low, yet high enough not to interfere with the headgear. Beneath its shadows one would fain forget the world. ”

“ On either side of the ship gaunt gray trunks of dead trees rise from the placid water, draped in some instances with the Spanish moss familiar to residents of our southern states, though not abundant on the Isthmus. More of the trees are hung with the trailing ropes of vines once bright with green foliage and brilliant flowers, now gray and dead like the parent trunk. Only the orchids and the air plants will continue to give some slight hint of life to the dull gray monotony of death. ”

“ Spanish moss, orchids and other plants grow as parasites over the trees, many of which are being strangled to death by this growth. Many parts of this territory have never been explored. Wild beasts rule the forests and hills. ”

“ Once rooted they are fed by dusting the outside of the sphagnum with soluble fertilizer and watering it in. As a finishing touch, we threw strands of Spanish moss over the branches. The misty-gray moss thrives, and even flowers.
As further proof that many plants prefer freedom to being confined in pots, try planting just one creeper—an episcia, for example—in the center of a spot filled with suitable soil. See how soon it will garland the top with lush foliage, how freely it flowers. Many plants recommended for hanging baskets are really creepers and are better off when treated this way. ”

“ The yellowish-green trunk rises through the tangled foliage that keeps near the ground, and towers fifty feet above, and there spreads in a crown of green so deep that it is almost black. It likes company, and seldom grows solitary. Its associates are the southern maples, red gum, tupelo, cypress, a dozen species of oak, [494] and occasionally pines on nearby higher ground. Festoons of grayish-green Spanish moss often add to the tropical character of the scene. The moss seldom hangs on the magnolia, but is frequently abundant on surrounding trees. ”

“ The plant which performs this strange feat is the Tillandsia usneoides, indigenous to tropical America, and generally known as 'Spanish Moss'. Its peculiarity is that it grows and flourishes without taking from its support any material whatsoever for the building up of its substance. Its natural habitat is the dry bark of virgin forest trees. Since civilization invaded its home it has acquired the habit of growing even on telegraph wires, which has given it the popular name of 'telegraph tresses'. ”

“ This nest contains no warming substance, such as wool, cotton, or cloth, but is almost entirely composed of the Spanish moss, interwoven in such a manner that the air can easily pass through it. The parents no doubt are aware of the intense heat which will exist ere long in this part of the world, and moreover take especial care to place their nest on the north-east side of the trees. ”

“ With so limited a hydrographical system and a scarcity of rainfall, irrigation and agricultural possibilities are but limited. In the humid portion of the territory sugar-cane, tropical fruits, vines, maguey, cereals, and other products are, however, raised. There are some natural products, especially the orchilla, or Spanish moss, which grows profusely in some parts of the west coast and is gathered and used commercially for dyeing. The climate in the north is hot, but dry and more temperate towards the south. The flora, few in species, are those of the other northern states of Mexico. ”

“ Nature had done all she could in wringing out whatever green and lusty life was left in rocks and sand to make the place home-like and cheerful. Beside the trees, there was a patch of kitchen-garden back of the house, a grape-vine or two on the walls, trailing moss hanging to its eaves,—the delicate web-like moss that grows along this coast out of dead wood; even the beach rocks glowed into colors,—dark browns, purples, and reds. ”

“ The unseen, mysterious seeds of mosses find their way into the lettered furrows, and are made to germinate by the continual moisture and watery sunshine of the English sky; and by-and-by, in a year, or two years, or many years, behold the complete inscription—HERE LIETH THE BODY, and all the rest of the tender falsehood—beautifully embossed in raised letters of living green, a bas-relief of velvet moss on the marble slab! It becomes more legible, under the skyey influences, after the world has forgotten the deceased, than when it was fresh from the stone-cutter's hands. ”

“ Some run and fly only in the daytime, others towards evening and in the short twilight; but the great majority issue from their hiding-places only in the night-time, and during the day lie concealed in withered leaves, beneath fallen logs, under bark, and in crevices amongst the moss growing on the trunks of trees, or even against the bare trunk, protected from observation by their mottled brown, grey, and greenish tints—assimilating in colour and appearance to the bark of the tree. ”

“ The aged trees, which grow more than one hundred feet in height, and whose tufted crests form splendid arches of foliage, the lianas which spread in every direction with the strangest parabolas, the moss, called Spaniard's beard, which hangs in long festoons from all the branches, impart to these vast solitudes an aspect at once grand and mysterious, which leads the mind to reverie and fills it with religious and melancholy thoughts. ”

“ Elsewhere the sand-wastes are clothed, especially in their deeper dells and hollows, with cistus-scrub or tamarisk, and the stone-pine (Pinus pinea) somehow finds sustenance and even luxuriates. How plant-life can survive on the remnants of pulverized rock is a mystery—though here, perhaps, the deep-seated roots strike into alluvial soil below—and no more comprehensible in view of the analogous fact that the vines producing the richest Spanish wines also flourish in equally ungenial soils. ”

“ But the two sentences that most interest me, are, that in the damp forests of Carolina, the Tillandsia, which is an 'epiphyte' (i.e., a plant growing on other plants,) "forms dense festoons among the branches of the trees, vegetating among the black mould that collects upon the bark of trees in hot damp countries; other species are inhabitants of deep and gloomy forests, and others form, with their spring leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas of Brazil." So they really seem to be a kind of moss, on a vast scale. ”

“ There are huge points of rock which time and nature are clothing with velvet garments of moss. Layer after layer of dust settles in the hollows, the rains beat it down, and the birds bring seeds. The tropical vegetation spreads out luxuriantly in thickets and underbrush, while curtains of interwoven vines hang from the branches of the trees and twine about their roots or spread along the ground, as if Flora were not yet satisfied but must place plant above plant. ”

“ HUNTING GUANACO AND OSTRICH, VALLEY OF RIO CHICO.
The plant, which in its growth resembles very closely the balsam bog of the Falkland Islands, and might be easily taken for it but for the absence of the gum, which perhaps was attributable to the quality of the soil or the season of the year, is easily recognisable by its mass of tiny green leaflets, and presents the appearance of a small hillock of earth crowned with delicate moss. By digging down into the heap, one large and several small tuberous roots are found, which when roasted in the ashes prove sufficiently palatable to hungry men. ”

“ Some of [193] the ash tree boles are heavily draped in a fur woven inextricably of dark green and fine-leaved ivy, pale green moss over which hover pendulous drops of gold, silver lichen, and ferns green and amber. Out of rock or wall gushes bright, crystal water, losing itself in moss and herbage below, or received into small stone tanks, and turned into a darkly gleaming, golden creature that throbs under the rain. ”

“ Speedily these become shallow lagoons, termed lucios—similar, we imagine, to the jheels of India—and a welcome haven they afford to the advance-guard of immigrant wildfowl from the north.
Plant-life in the marismas is regulated by the relative saltness of the soil. In the deeper lucios no vegetation can subsist; but where the level rises, though but a few inches, and the ground is less saline, the hardy samphire (in Spanish, armajo) appears, covering with its small isolated bushes vast stretches of the lower marisma. ”

“ In moist places, Sphagnum, or bog-moss, is very common, with many of the allied kinds of moss which compose peat in the alpine districts of Europe.
"The mountain-tops are very bare; affording only Mosses and Lichens, which cling with astonishing pertinacity to the rugged faces of the sharp peaks and piles of rock. ”

“ Rivers are not stocked, and trout hatcheries are almost unknown. The poacher is everywhere, using snares, spears, and the deadly dynamite. Thousands of small fish are scooped out of the small pools of the tributaries with pole-nets during dry seasons. But, on the other hand, Spain is, happily, almost free, except in the mining districts of the north, from poisoned and contaminated waters. There are thousands of miles of beautiful rivers with no factories, works, or big cities within many leagues of their lengths. Then, the fish in the Spanish rivers are splendidly prolific. ”

“ There is a black, hard, crumply moss, that grows on the rocks and large stones in those parts, which is of infinite service to the natives, as it sometimes furnishes them with a temporary subsistence, when no animal food can be procured. ”

“ The fogs and more steady low temperature of insular situation, which now prevail, not only induce that chemical change in dead and dying vegetables which forms peat-moss, and preserves this moss from decay, but also being too cool for the vegetation of the gramineæ, &c. tend only to promote the general spread of sphagni and other moss-generating plants, which, again, are almost the only plants that can vegetate on acrid moss-flow, as they draw little or nothing from below, and are nourished directly by the moisture and other fluids of the atmosphere. ”

“ I walked in among the herd, which numbered about ten thousand, and watched them eat. They would paw away the snow until they reached the moss, which lay about ten inches below the surface, and then, kneeling down, would dig it out with their teeth. The moss is about ten inches thick, and is a loose, spongy mass of vegetation. It will not bear the weight of a man, the foot sinking through it. It forms a most excellent food for deer, but horses will not eat it. ”

“ The number of endemic species is exceptionally large, the number of monotypic genera in the Peninsula greater than in any other part of the Mediterranean domain. The endemic species are naturally most numerous in the mountains, and above all in the loftiest ranges, the Pyrenees and the Sierra Nevada; but it is a peculiarity of the Spanish table-land, as compared with the plains and table-lands of central Europe, that it also possesses a considerable number of endemic plants and plants of extremely restricted range. ”

“ That blackness at the root—though only so notable in this wood-moss and collateral species, is indeed a general character of the mosses, with rare exceptions. It is their funeral blackness;—that, I perceive, is the way the moss leaves die. They do not fall—they do not visibly decay. But they decay invisibly, in continual secession, beneath the ascending crest. They rise to form that crest, all green and bright, and take the light and air from those out of which they grew;—and those, their ancestors, darken and die slowly, and at last become a mass of mouldering ground. ”

“ Along the trail are mosses of multitudinous kinds. The delicate star moss unfolds its feathery points of green; a strange variety with thick, mottled leaves grows like a full blown rose around decayed trees, and a small, pale, gray-green trumpet-shaped moss rears hosts of elfin horns. Only a skilled botanist could classify these rich carpets which Nature has spread over the dead royalty of her forests, so that even in their death there is resurrection; even in their decay, new life. ”

“ The level ground at the bottom of the valley where the Moesa runs is cultivated with great care. Here the people have gathered the stones in heaps round any great rock which is too difficult to move, and the whole mass has in time taken a mulberry hue, varied with gray and russet lichens, or blobs of velvety green moss. ”

“ This moss is indeed by itself a remarkable phenomenon in the economy of nature; being a kind of balancing power, absorbing the useless surplus of water from the ground, from the swamps, and from the atmosphere especially, using it in part for its growth, carefully husbanding it for the preservation and transformation of all the woody tissue, its own included, into peat, and in dry seasons distributing the remainder to feed the numerous springs which have their source in the bogs. Thus, the peat bogs, like the glaciers of some countries, feed mighty rivers. ”

“ In the Mosses the plant-body (gametophyte) is always separable into a radially organized, supporting and conducting axis (stem) Mosses. and thin, flat, assimilating, and transpiring appendages (leaves) . To the base of the stem are attached a number of branched cell-threads (rhizoids) which ramify in the soil, fixing the plant and absorbing water from soil. [For the histology of the comparatively simple but in many respects aberrant Bog-mosses (Sphagnaceae) , see Bryophyta.] The stems of the other mosses resemble one another in their main histological features. ”