It is the time of year when nature puts on its brown coat as flowers, grasses, and trees shut down for the winter.

Now is the time to take notice of the lush green cover on many surfaces provided by mosses.

Mosses have a relatively simple structure and the fossil record shows that there were mosses on Earth long before conifers and flowers.

They have a simple stem clothed in leaves that are usually only a single cell thick.

They have threads called rhizoids to anchor themselves but they absorb water and nutrients directly from their surroundings and so don’t have roots.

Taking in water directly is fine, but mosses struggle to control water loss in dry weather and they become dehydrated very easily.

This would kill more advanced plants but some mosses have evolved to cope with it.

They simply shut down and wait for it to rain again when they will spring back into life.

Not all mosses can do that and so other species are restricted to living in damp places.

Springy turf mossSpringy turf moss (Image: supplied)

In the past, mosses have been used as soothing wound dressings and some may have curative properties.

Some mosses can store huge amounts of water compared to their dry state.

Sphagnum mosses are particularly good and are harvested to use in horticulture for jobs such as packing hanging baskets.

The trouble is that this harvest interferes with their boggy habitat and many sphagnum sites are now endangered.

Mosses don’t have flowers and don’t produce seeds.

The leafy plant produces male and female gametes that fuse and produce a capsule of spores.

The spores are dispersed and develop into leafy plants if they find a suitable place to grow.

They are great colonisers, growing on bare rocks and soil as well as trees and other surfaces.

This allows a build-up of mineral particles and can provide a new home to other plants.

Over time the bare surface is buried in many types of plant growth.

Some people are bothered by moss taking over their roofs.

Given a few thousand years, a house would be overtaken by plant growth and would need an archaeologist to find it, but it is unlikely to do any real harm in a modern house’s lifetime.

There are about 1,000 British moss species and they are found in a wide variety of places, but few have common names.

Those that do are usually just descriptive, such as Springy Turf-moss which grows among damp grass and, surprise surprise, is springy.

One of my favourites is Silky Wall Feather-moss.

Its tight corkscrew curls can be seen if you take a close look at the mixture of mosses on the churchyard wall along Church Lane behind Potbury’s.

Give it a stroke and you might be surprised how soft it feels.

Oak trees in damp woods at the top of Grigg’s Lane are wrapped in a shaggy coat of Mouse-tail Moss.

Heath Star-moss is another that does as it says on the tin, it grows on acidic heathland such as Mutter’s Moor and is spangled with star-like rings of white bristles.

Many people think they are just moss, but these ancient plants are varied and fascinating and worth a closer look.