clubmoss strobili, Henne

The ground pines, which are also known as club mosses, are just now starting to put on their annual show. These ancient plants, which have been around for at least 300 million years, are neither a kind of dwarf conifer nor a giant moss, but rather a spore-bearer that is lumped into a group called the Fern Allies. The spore cases, those yellow-green conelike structures that crown the plant, carry gazillions—how's that for a scientific term?—of tiny reproductive "seeds," and these, in terms out, have had a number of uses, medicinal powders and a coating for pills, among them. As a photographer, however, my favorite early use was as an agent of flash illumination.  Kids have always loved to kick members of the Lycopodium genus when the cones are ripe and make them "smoke." Turns out that if you do this to enough cones at the same time in a confined space and provide a spark, that cloud of spores will explode and give off just the right amount of light to capture a portrait. No wonder so many subjects in those early studios had wide-open eyes.