If I had to make a list of my favourite top ten common names for plants, this one would surely be among them. I’ll quote from Schofield’s “Some Common Mosses of British Columbia”: Commonly called the rough neck moss or shaggy moss because of the untidy leaves at the shoot tips. A whimsical name, electrified cat tail moss, has gained some popularity in British Columbia (emphasis added). The USDA Plants Database uses rough goose neck moss, as yet another alternative. I’ll stick with electrified cat tail moss. Had E. E. Cummings Walt Whitman (see comments) been a bryologist, I’m sure he would have written, “I sing the moss electric.” for this particular species.
Rhytidiadelphus triquetrus is circumpolar for the northern hemisphere in its distribution, extending south into lower latitudes along mountain ranges (e.g., California and Arkansas). A broad range typically means a plant can grow in a variety of conditions, and it is no exception. Substrates for this moss species include well-drained sites in coniferous forests, on boulders and logs and, less frequently, tree trunks (source is again Schofield’s book), though Mosses and Liverworts in Wales also mentions dunes and “certain types of broad-leaf woodland”.
Photography resource link: From Guy Tal’s “The Essential Landscape” series: In the Name of All That is Good – On the Roles of the Artist, the Activist, and the Critic via Nature Photographers Online. Guy questions whether it is possible to be both artist and activist.
Walt Whitman, Daniel, no?
Walt Whitman, yes!
Oh blimey, how did I mess that one up? The (even more) embarrassing part is I was rereading “Leaves of Grass” just a few weeks ago. Somehow I’ve made that wrong association in my mind for a long time, and not even rereading the poem helped.
Could have been worse, Daniel, you might have credited Ray Bradbury instead (see his collection of short stories, I Sing the Body Electric!) Lovely stories, and no slight meant to Bradbury, but Whitman he ain’t…. 🙂
I love the common name ‘electrified cat tail moss’. It’s definitely a propos.
Colleen
I’m so happy to have a definitive identification of this moss! I’m sure that they are easy to discern for the bryologist, but not necessarily for the photographer.Thanks.
There was recently a long and thorough and too honest biograpy of Walt Whiman probably on PBS but it could have been late night CBC or TVO.
A very complete expose of his life and times including his interest in Civil War soldiers. He really did love everyone not just in his poems.
He was quite a showman and a selfpromoter at which he was obviously successful as he must be the most famous US poet. In this he was similar to Whistler and numerous other American writers of what now is the last century. They discussed his relationship with Emerson and Thoreau who warned him to cut his explicit homoerotic imagery but he wouldnt. His Leaves of Grass kept getting rewritten expanded with each of numerous editions. I must have been naive as a youth just as when I read the Picture of Dorian Gray I completely missed what the infamous crime was as I had no clue of the sexual proclivities of Wilde or Whitman. I thought the words they wrote were just Victorian sentiment not to be taken literally. They were.
So now one could reread the whole of Leaves of Grass with an altered spin.
The mystic poet the lover of all nature of all life and of all men.
This exuberant and formless moss would actually be the perfect visual analogue of Walt Whitmans free verse, formless endless shapeless phyllorhoea like logorrhoea.