Mosses were featured in the New York Times, Home and Garden section last week in an article entitled "Moss Makes a Lush, No-Care Lawn" By Jancee Dunn. It is a nice article and features some fun pictures such as moss growing on an old pair of gym shoes! I have seen mosses growing on a number of discarded items in the woods, but this is the funniest one that I have seen. She talks about the increasing use of mosses in landscaping and gardening in the eastern United States.
They also feature some mosses of Connecticut and mention a local farm that sells moss for use in landscaping and gardening. I have talked about this farm in a previous blog post. It is the Sticks and Stones Farm in Newtown, Connecticut.
There is one fact issue in this article. They state "There are approximately 12,000 varieties of moss in North America ... ". Now I am not sure what they mean by 'varieties'. Do they just mean species, or species and sub-species, or is it really vague and maybe they are talking about all the different color varieties moss comes in? I am not sure what they really meant but basically they got their value wrong. The latest numbers are that there are 12,000-15,000 moss species worldwide! North America has many fewer. The latest treatment on the mosses of North America is through the Flora of North America Association. The three volumes on North American bryophytes will cover 1,900 mosses, liverworts and hornworts, with probably about 1200 to 1500 of those being mosses. So the NYT article might just have been off by one zero, but that order of magnitude makes a huge difference in the number!
Otherwise the article is well-written and talks about moss gardening from a variety of angles. I would highly recommend reading this article if you are thinking about gardening with moss. It might just get you hooked.
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
Don't tell me they found Tyrannosaurus rex meat again!3 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
-
Course Corrections4 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
2 comments:
Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
- <a href="http://www.fieldofscience.com/">FoS</a> = FoS
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hey, that's the article I was going to send to you!
ReplyDeleteI looked at my posting rate from April yesterday and felt that I needed to post more regularly. Then I remembered the article that you mentioned at the party at decided to look it up. Sorry that I scooped you before you had a chance to send it along. Thanks tons for the tip! It isn't often that moss makes the major newspapers.
ReplyDelete