Country diary: the quiet miracle of the common feather-moss

Green feathers in the wood, the plumage of moss: it appears unaffected by a squall that rattles up the lane. Its rain washes around the old, laid trunks of hedge sycamores, its wind blows goldfinch from mullein seedheads under power lines into hazels; its noise silences the thrush who, for some days in his ash tree, has been auditioning an oratory of fragmented phrases repeated in short bursts that will become a heart-stopping song before too long. The moss appears unaffected by the traffic of people, dogs and birds, unaffected by the seasons and the sudden appearance of snowdrops from a recurring dream.

Common feather-moss, Kindbergia praelonga, has branching ferny shoots up to 3cm long, with divided leaves that in some woodland forms are bipinnate or tripinnate with triangular-shaped tips so they look like feathers; they can be found in moist, shady places on a variety of surfaces.

Little has been known of the chemistry of mosses such as Kindbergia, but research reveals within them a remarkable reservoir of anti-microbial, anti-fungal, cardiotonic, tumour-affecting, allergy-causing, plant-growth-regulating, even possible Aids-therapy chemicals.

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In a world that hardly recognises the presence of this feathery miracle, away from the lane’s verges in the thick of the wood, Kindbergia spreads across the ground and over stones and logs, climbs up trees, posts, rocks and banks. If I stand here long enough it will creep up from my boots and plume me over in a green quiet like a rotting log.

This warmer, wetter climate is a mossy place. Palaeoecological evidence over 9,000 years shows that some kinds of moss can tolerate warmer and drier conditions; however, most of Britain’s mossy bogs, fens and mires are too physically degraded to cope with climate heating.

Moss in places of humidity and shelter like this wood is, at the moment, creating a miniature rainforest layer with its own dimensions of space and time, its own inhabitants, re-establishing a beyond-world to cover the one we are familiar with. This winter pall – a word that comes from the covering of a tomb or shroud for the dead – holds its own glow in a greenwood of the shadows, an effulgence despite the leafless trees and lightless skies above.