Squirrel-tail mosses in Llandaff North

Last week proved to be rather an eventful one for finding scarce epiphytic mosses in urban Cardiff.

It started with a trip to my local Post Office on Gabalfa Avenue on Wednesday lunchtime. This falls within a different tetrad to my house and there were a few common species still missing from it, so I had a poke around after Post Office duties were complete. I was feeling pleased about adding Calliergonella cuspidata and Metzgeria violacea to the tetrad list, along with a few other things including Syntrichia virescens on a street lime tree (confirmed by nerve section checking). But I really wasn't expecting to find Habrodon perpusillus. A young-ish Ash tree (perhaps 25-30 years old) in amenity grassland near some houses had a swathe of Habrodon from ground level up to at least 2.5m, in a band about 10cm wide on the east side of the trunk. There were several other ashes nearby but I couldn't find any Habrodon on them.

I went back the following day and found a second tree with Habrodon around 150m away - a single patch on the west side of a lime tree growing between two of the Lydstep tower blocks and facing the rear wall of a line of garages. A more mundane location for a rare bryophyte would be hard to imagine.

 The day after I went back with the kids to look for more Habrodon trees. None were forthcoming, but I was almost as pleased to find a healthy tuft of Leucodon sciuroides on a Norway Maple street tree nearby.

 

On the way home we re-found a scruffier patch of Leucodon on a street lime tree. I first found this colony last summer but had been unable to relocate it until last week.

 As if this wasn't enough fun for one week, another outing with the kids at the weekend revealed another Habrodon patch - this one in a nicer setting on an Ash on the Taff riverbank.

I took small samples from each of these Habrodon trees to make sure I'd got the ID right. Most of them had abundant brown-green gemmae on the stems and leaves.

All five of these trees are within 1km of my house in suburban north Cardiff. I'd scarcely have believed Habrodon would be in such a humdrum place, but given that Sam found it near the castle in the heart of Caerphilly last year perhaps I should have been less surprised. Both of these squirrel-tail mosses remain scarce, but it is encouraging that they seem to be starting to regain some lost ground, like many other epiphytes.

Sam recently sent me details of the Habrodon colonies which Chris Forster Brown's found in 2013, at Fonmon and near Merthyr Mawr. This makes seven sites in Glamorgan with recent records, which must surely be as many as any county in the UK.