The word bryophyte refers to a group of plants that may have colonised terrestrial Earth almost half a billion years ago. They need water to reproduce sexually and they love rain. So it’s hardly surprising that Britain is an important archipelago for them, with the two main groups, liverwort and mosses, represented by nearly 300 and 770 species respectively. This is a 20th of all the world’s bryophytes.
Perhaps the best summary of the British public’s sense of the group was offered by a friend recently, who said that he hadn’t been aware that there was more than one bryophyte. Moss doesn’t occupy our conscious minds. It lives at the periphery, trembling on the edge of our sense of things. Especially when it rains, because moss is then even more luminous.
