Yet another of this year’s mostly cloudy and chilly afternoons found me along Piney Woods Church Road, scrambling for an image to share for today. I explored a few new possibilities that might lead to photographs, including an almost-Southwestern miniature erosion landscape with lichens. But for the most part, the muse eluded me. Fortunately, I had begun my outing — like so many before this one — taking a few photographs of a mossy spot along the wooded part of the road, looking back toward the junction with Rico Road. I tried to investigate what species of moss this is, but I turned up lots of photographs of Spanish Moss and Elisabeth Moss instead. And I learned from a listserv on bryophytes (mosses and their kin) that a field guide to Georgia mosses is well overdue (if anyone out there is interested in a topic for their next book). Short of a name for this moss, I can at least identify the stalks scattered among the green leaves as sporophytes, and the capsules atop the stalks (containing the spores for the next gametophyte generation) as sporangia. The complete life cycle of mosses is depicted here.
