Thursday 7 January 2016

False Fern-moss at the National Botanic Garden of Wales

Cyathophorum bulbosum
there are nine six-year old dead Dicksonia stumps in the Wallace Garden
Ptychomnium aciculare
Yesterday I was passing the Wallace Garden Tree Ferns at NBGW and couldn't resist checking on the two antipodean mosses that I managed identify last year (Dicranoloma mensiesii and Ptychomnium aciculare). There was an another unfamiliar and quite conspicuous species visible at the base of one of the trunks, which I'd not seen previously and this morning I've managed to locate images and a description on the excellent Australian Mosses Online that show it to be the rather distinctive Cyathophorum bulbosum (Hypopterygiaceae). As mentioned in a previous post these dead Dickinsonia stumps are reported to have been imported from New Zealand about six years ago. There is just the one species of Cyathophorum in Australia, and it seems in New Zealand, so the id should be good. These tree ferns keep producing new species and there's a possibility that some of the other samples of odd looking things I collected yesterday might eventually prove to be of NZ origin too.
...a few microscope images of Cyathophorum bulbosum

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