Downtown Shelton

I still have a cold and am not up to doing a big hike this week so I walked around town. It was raining very lightly when I walked out my door at about 11:30 am. The Bank of America was my goal but on the way I found some nice cushion mosses on the ledge at the Cornerstone building. The Cornerstone building is next to the food bank and folks were starting to line up on the sidewalk to wait for food. I made them a bit nervous with my camera so I only took a few pictures of the moss before I left.

I really wanted to go to the Bank of America and check out all then neat mosses I saw growing on the ledge, but when I got to the BOA I saw it was open and I’ve already been told off once for taking pictures there so I gave it a pass.
After leaving BOA I headed over to the Shelton history museum to take a look at the Atrichum undulatum that I found there last week. Then I saw something that blew me away and I wondered why I had not seen it the last time I was at the museum. What I saw was a large carpet of Marchantia polymorpha.

Marchantia was covering most of the flowerbeds on the west side of the building. I found both gemme cups and budding antheridiophore. I spent some time admiring this liverwort, taking pictures of it and looking at it with my hand lens and this attracted the attention of a senior citizen whom I recognize by sight but not by name. She recognized me too. I think she is a volunteer at the museum.

She wanted to know what I was up to, my behavior seemed quite puzzling to her. So told her I was studying bryophytes and I showed her my prized liverwort and she said “oh a moss” I told her it was close to a moss but it was actually a liverwort and it was the first time I have ever found it. She seemed to be happy for me. She then gently advised me “well if you want to find that you should go to the rain forest”. I explained to her that I had been looking for it in the forest, but it turns out that this liverwort is a greenhouse weed and that is why I never found it in the forest. So we both had a good laugh about that in the now pouring rain. The rain was really starting to come down at this point so we parted ways and I headed back home with my prize.

Posted on March 10, 2012 09:55 PM by mossy