LaChance

Symphyothricum pilosum, Asteraceae

While walking about the countryside surrounding my hometown in northern Italy, I detected in the distance a large cloud of white small flowers, gently waving in the breeze in the middle of a grassy field. It turned out to be a colony of the North America native Hairy white oldfield aster, previously known as Aster pilosum. It might be hard to tell from the photos, but some of the plants were probably over 3 feet tall and the cluster itself at least 5 feet wide.

Polytrichum formosum, Polytrichaceae

Bank haircap, a mat-forming moss, is one of the over 900 species of non-vascular plants which make Scotland the land of the bryophytes. A unique combination of climatic and geological factors have made this division extremely successful here, allowing for possibly 5% of the world’s species to be present in a quite small geographical area. 

Species within the genus Polytrichum do not present the same characteristics of most other mosses though, and have developed differentiated water-conductive tissues and parallel photosynthetic lamellae, which reduce water loss by trapping layers of moist air. These adaptations have made it easier for these mosses to withstand drier conditions and effectively grow taller. In the case of Dawsonia superba, a Southeast Asia and Oceania native in the same family, this can mean growing as high as 50 cm - almost 20 in! - making it the tallest known moss.