Juniper Haircap Moss - 4 May 2024

On my evening walk yesterday I spotted this beautiful plant on some rocks and took a photo of it. I was sure that due to poor lighting the photo was going to be blurry, but it was okay.

You can see a bit of blurriness towards the edges of the photo, but I was still able to do a Google Lens search to find out its proper name.

This type of moss is called Juniper Haircap, or Polytrichum Juniperinum. It actually reminds me of algae.

The website I linked to above offers a number of extra photographs to aid identification. Part of the identification process includes male and female plants. The website also tells you a bit about the plant's surroundings :

A common species of dry, exposed, acidic habitats, frequently occurring as a pioneer on recently disturbed or burnt, acidic soils

I also happened to come across where the information was very likely obtained from. I think that the website above must have accessed this to tell you what I quoted above regarding soil acidity. I find it a bit odd that the website did not include the source it used to obtain that snippet of information.

During my research on this plant I also saw reference of how this plant could be ‘propagated’ and as you might recall I’m also interested in that aspect of plants so I followed a couple of links that led me to You Tube :

The video above is from 2021; it makes reference to a website which sadly does not seem to exist anymore. The person in the video shows us the long length that the Juniper Haircap moss normally reaches and then she puts some of it into a pot with ‘forest soil’, ie with the right acidity. I wanted to see what other interesting information there was available on the website but that’s not feasible now.

Thank you for reading !