This writer’s great-grandfather, homesteading on the Pilchuck, put down thin red cedar poles and covered them with moss before laying his homestead cabin’s floor.  Moss, to pioneers, was used for mechanical, rather than medicinal, use, e.g. the Farm has adopted the Pilchuck Glass School’s use of emerald green because of a debate won by Dale Chihuly years ago, “everything up here in Freeborn/Victoria Heights turns green like moss, we might as well use green.”  Perhaps not important enough to note here, but at our next-door Pilchuck Glass School, COLOR IS IMPORTANT.  As with 99% of all the Earth’s native plants, few if any modern studies of these species’ unique molecules have been reported.  Some species have taken 3 ½ millions of years to evolve under intense stress and we don’t know, can’t imagine, why or how.  Of the Earth’s 18,500 Bryophyte species and the ~250,000 vascular, 25% of today’s medicines derive from but 40 native plant species, none of them Bryophytes.  Unlike with Cascadia’s 900 flowering plant species, the use of forestry herbicides has shown little effect (mosses have no vascular system, cannot be treated “systemically”).  They are however, greatly affected by pollution and climate change in that many do not disperse easily (few spores, no seeds.)  Their difficulties in migrating will likely contribute to the ongoing loss of biodiversity in the Northwest.  When 1 of our 650 native species of moss disappears, no one will notice.

https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology/plants-and-fungi
https://byjus.com/biology/three-types-of-bryophytes/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryophyte

The number of mosses as compared to vascular species is:

less than 10%
~ 25%
equal

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