One of my favorite books for armchair reading is “Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia.”* It includes a lot of plants from our region, and covers wildflowers, trees, shrubs, grasses, sedges, rushes, ferns and their allies, mosses and liverworts, and lichens. Browsing through a while ago my eye lit on club mosses, old friends from my New England childhood.

Club mosses are seedless vascular plants (like ferns and horsetails). In the family Lycopodiaceae, most of them are genus Lycopodium, which means "wolf paw." I like better the common name "ground pine," which is used for one species, L. dendroideum, but also for the whole group. Many ground pine species run along the ground with horizontal stems and upright side branches 6-8 inches high, each of which resembles a small conifer tree in a universe of a different scale from ours. A branch of L. dendroideum looks like a solitary white pine in shape, while a branch of L. complanatum ("ground cedar") resembles a tiny cedar crowned mysteriously with pale green candles.

Club mosses, like ferns, have a lifecycle which alternates generations between a conspicuous spore-bearing form which is diploid (has two pairs of chromosomes), and an inconspicuous gamete-bearing form which is haploid (has one set of choromosomes). In club mosses, the gametophyte (gamete-bearing plant) is inconspicuous because it is underground. It gets its nourishment from a mycorryzal association with fungal mycelium. The gametes (eggs and sperm) are born on the same individual underground plant. When they join to form an embryo, it grows up to be the sporophyte we see in the woods, which sheds spores, which grow into gametophytes.

The name "club moss" refers to the club-like shape of the spore sacs, which sit in the angle of modified leaves, which in most cases are collected into cone-like structures, the candles, on the aerial branch tips. The abundant spores of club mosses contain a lot of oil and used to be used for flash photography and fireworks.
If you go on line to www.plants.usda.gov, and search Lycopodium, you will find nine species of club moss listed for Idaho, all of them in northern and central counties. There are no listings for Latah County, but I have seen a couple of species on Moscow Mountain. If we have a low-snow El Nino winter, I may get to go looking for them before spring, and this time I will try to key them out to species.
 
*”Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia.” Parish, Coupe, Lloyd. Lone Pine Publishing. Vancouver, BC. 1996.
 
Suvia Judd raises alpacas, squas, and fruit in Moscow, and walks on Moscow Mountain.