Ellen and the Bryophytes
The new book, Mosses and Liverworts: an introductory guide to the Bantry Bay area by Rory Hodd is a delight. With stunning photos, very clear descriptions and helpful diagrams, it provides a great introduction to a fascinating miniature world so easily overlooked. See more of the book and buy it here
Bryophytes – mosses and liverworts – are an important part of Ellen’s story. While she is better known for her work on seaweeds, including her wonderful watercolour drawings of them, she had a great love of mosses and liverworts. She writes about her delight in them and in the range of habitats in which they are found – mountains, woodlands, riverbanks, and beside streams and waterfalls.
Ellen was part of a specialist community of botanists studying bryophytes. The Bantry Bay area is a wonderful place for mosses and liverworts, and Ellen was very skilled at distinguishing between the various species; finding and identifying new ones. Ellen’s fellow botanists were thrilled by the discoveries she made.
Her main correspondent was Dawson Turner, a banker and botanist in Yarmouth, on the East Anglian coast of England (a place of boring flat sand, as he said himself). Dawson Turner passed liverwort specimens Ellen sent him to William Jackson Hooker who was writing a major book on them (later he became Director of Kew Gardens). Dawson Turner sent Ellen’s mosses to William Borrer. Many of Ellen’s bryophyte specimens are now in the Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden, see here for the story of how they got there, via these Williams and another.
Ellen’s love of mosses and liverworts was especially strong in winter. In a letter of 5 January 1810, she wrote to English botanist, Dawson Turner:
I hope Mr. Hooker will soon give us the Jungermanniæ (liverworts). What a delightful family they are.
I hope you found the mosses in the last parcel interesting. All mosses are very much so, nothing delights me more than the sight of a great rock cover’d with a variety of mosses. In winter the rich shades of green they afford are very beautiful. I have a rock in my little flower garden, the north side of which is freely covered with mosses & ferns.
The free leaflet, Micro-nature Guide to the Bryophytes of West Cork, developed alongside the book, can be downloaded from the mosses and liverworts page here. Suitable for anyone of any age, it is a lovely first step into bryophytes. It includes some fascinating facts, including these two:
Some of the mosses and liverworts that grow in the west of Ireland are tropical species, which grow nowhere else in Europe. They can survive here because of the mild, damp climate, which is like a tropical cloud forest.
There is such an abundance of mosses on earth that they absorb more carbon than all the trees in the world. This ‘carbon capture’ is needed to help prevent climate change. So it is just as important to save tiny plants as it is to save trees!
How about using part of this winter and the spring to get to know these little plants better?