Hypnum cupressiforme
cypress-leaved plait-moss
A cosmopolitan opportunist; the moss most likely to be underfoot.
iggi.boo — bryophyte registry — vol. ii
i g g i · b o o
A haunted moss garden, transcribed. Bryophytes outnumber the loud organisms by orders of magnitude; we publish their dossier.
Six occupants of the green understorey.
Filed by taxonomic shape: genus, family, order. Hover a card to read the secondary character.
Polytrichum commune
common haircap
Among the tallest of mosses; conducts water through internal vessels resembling vascular plants.
Sphagnum palustre
prairie sphagnum
Ecosystem engineer of peatlands; locks away carbon for millennia.
Leucobryum glaucum
pincushion moss
Forms tight cushions that retain water like a sponge; pale due to dead, hyaline cells.
Dicranum scoparium
broom moss
Leaves all leaning the same direction, as if the wind had spoken to it once and never stopped.
Bryum argenteum
silvery thread-moss
The cosmopolitan stowaway; the moss in the sidewalk, on every continent including Antarctica.
The shaded side of the garden.
Carbon archives.
Peatlands occupy three percent of land, yet store more carbon than every standing forest combined. Sphagnum is the curator.
30% of terrestrial soil carbon, held in moss-built peat.Air rectifiers.
Mosses absorb particulates and metals directly through leaf surfaces, with no roots between them and the air. City moss-walls reduce nitrogen oxides measurably.
x20 surface area for gas exchange, gram-for-gram, vs vascular leaves.Water stewards.
A handful of dry sphagnum will absorb up to twenty times its weight in water. Moss-rich watersheds release rainfall slowly — the original soft-engineered floodplain.
x20 water-mass holding capacity per dry weight.Slow time.
A square metre of cushion moss may have aged a century without anyone noticing. Mosses do not grow toward us; they grow toward each other.
100y recovery time for trampled cushion communities.A small key, for naming what you see.
Pick the answer that matches your specimen.
01
Does the moss form a flat, woven mat across its surface?
probable identification
V · Colophon
Set in Space Mono & Work Sans.
Drawings transcribed from herbarium notebooks. Wave-forms generated nightly from a sine of moss growth rate. Filed under: bryology, modernism, slow web.
- authorityiggi.boo registry
- editionII · 2026
- further readingSchofield · Introduction to Bryology
- further readingKimmerer · Gathering Moss
— the garden ends here. return left.