Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

From a few feet away they just look like vivid splashes of various shades of green. Close up, mosses are very different from each other. The Rosalubryum below has characteristic nodding capsules, for example. They’re barely visible to someone standing up–but well worth getting down for a close look:

Rosulabryum sp, Cobblers Gully August 3: the stalk is only one or two centimetres tall, but close up, with its red colour and drooping capsule, it's very distinctive. Photo, Bernard Slattery

The moss itself is also distinctive, shaped like a tiny green rosette:

From a distance the Rosulabryum is just a dark green satin surface. The delicate rosettes are clearer if you get down and peer at them. This moss--with and without capsules-- is prolific along the track in the Walmer South Conservation reserve, where this was taken on August 4. Photo: Bernard Slattery

Now is the time to get out and have a look at the wonderful moss carpets in our bushlands. We had great rain last year, and through the summer, but since March, our rainfall has been about 15% below the long term average. Already some of the mosses are starting to look a bit dry in the early August warmth–so maybe the season won’t last much longer. Of course, with a new burst of rain they can recover remarkably…but why wait?

Spring is around the corner, with spectacular flowering of Hardenbergia, and emergence of many other flowering plants like Hovea, Daviesia and Hakea.

But by far the most prolific forms of life in the bush at the moment are the mosses and lichens, forming curious carpets and even aerial displays almost everywhere. The pics below show lichens of the Cladonia genus which form part of a group known loosely as squamulose: that is, they don’t cling to the surface, but send out independent, definitely three dimensional bodies off leaf like bases called squamules. Cladonia are normally found in damp, sheltered spots:

Cladonia sp, Smutta's Track: they don't look much from a distance, but have a strange fascination if you get down on your knees for a close up look. Photo: Bernard Slattery

Another three dimensional group are called ‘fruticose’. An example is the Usnea genus, or ‘beard lichens’, which can be seen on dead and even living twigs around our bushlands:

Usnea sp, 'beard lichen', Tarilta gorge July 29, 2011 Photo Bernard Slattery

The microscopic strangeness of these combinations of alga and fungus should not blind us to their importance: they play a crucial role in creating and binding soil. On a more mundane level, lichens are indicators of air quality: they take in nutrients directly from

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