I love liverworts

I think myself very lucky to live in the country. Yes, it may have a few downsides (few places will deliver you a takeaway, it costs a fortune to get a taxi from town, and popping out for a loaf of bread requires an expedition) but the benefits to my mental well-being outweigh these things massively. I really appreciate having the natural world on my doorstep and being able to go for an impromptu walk to put things into perspective. If you're feeling aggravated about something, it gives you many other things to concentrate on, and you realise that neither you nor the sources of your stress are the centre of the universe.

I went for a walk yesterday. Naturally I took a pot (never be without your pot). I had mosses and liverworts in mind. There are lots of mosses that grow on the drystone walls around where I live, but I had a different habitat in mind: the stubble-filled fields. And I was delighted to find my quarry: a Riccia liverwort.

Just look at it, it's so sweet. Ok, so you're probably thinking I'm really losing the plot now. But see how small and delightfully formed it is. Who would even suspect such a strange and neatly branching plant growing in a field at all.

Lots of liverworts look a bit like mosses - they're called 'leafy liverworts'. But Riccia is a 'thallose liverwort' - it doesn't have leaves but a thallus (a flattish sheet of cells). You might be familiar with the thallose Marchantia if you've ever looked at liverworts before. But I appreciate that most people haven't looked at liverworts before and are barely (if at all) aware of their existence. Oh how they're missing out.

I have found a very good explanation of everything liverworty on the pages of the Australian National Botanic Gardens. They even mention Riccias on this page so you can read all about how they grow and reproduce. As you might suspect from their appearance in the field, they are experts at opportunistically growing on freshly exposed soil when conditions get a bit wetter.

Those ANBG pages are also an excellent introduction to the other bryophytes: mosses and hornworts (although of course their examples are largely antipodean). If liverworts are relatively unknown (to normal people) compared to mosses, then hornworts are super obscure. A couple of years ago I went on an FSC bryophytes course and we spent one afternoon literally crawling around a field (luckily we were well away from a road where anyone could see us) - and I was super chuffed to find a hornwort. There were also many Riccias which is why I thought to check my local field yesterday. In fact there's a whole book about Arable Bryophytes written by Ron Porley (I feel a purchase coming on).

If you're thinking of choosing mosses and liverworts (and I do recommend them if you like looking at the detail of lovely and tiny things) then a nice Riccia would be a good addition to your collection. Because they like to leap in when arable fields are cut, this is the ideal time of year to look. But there are many reasonably easily identified large mosses you can find in more urban areas too.

A pre-1850 Gould microscope (CC Wellcome Images)

A useful aside: Student K just popped in with her mushrooms and we viewed a couple through a dissecting microscope. Much oohing was heard over the super details revealed. Dave then showed us how our microscope camera can Bluetooth an image to your phone. You can also get a decent image by holding your phone over the eyepiece. So don't forget this as an option for illustrating your notebook - feel free to bring in your specimens of all kinds.