Club moss, Home

The Cold-That-Will-Not-Depart—sounds like a good character for a Harry Potter adventure—has not, alas, left the building, but I'm trying to pay as little attention to the virus as possible and just carry on. Still, my stamina is at a relatively low ebb and if I try to push too hard, I start a new round of coughing and sneezing. There's a word for this: yuck. So while the health tide remains out, I'm sticking closing to home on my treks, and in the course of walking yet another trapped mouse in the Prius out to its new home in a rock wall at the edge of the woods, I noticed a lilliputian forest of tiny evergreen plants. These were not, however, baby pines or hemlocks, but rather, full-sized fern relatives known as Clubmosses. There are a number of different Lycopodium species in our woods, some of which bear a kind of cone, some of them coneless. This one, I think, belongs in the latter category and may, as soon as I get motivated to do some genuine botany, be a member of the Shining Clubmoss clan.