Club mosses: running cedar, left, and princess pine
Photo: Kevin McKeon
Princess Pine: More Than Meets the Eye
By Kevin McKeon, Maine Master Naturalist
Walking around the forest trails, you’re likely to notice patches of 4- to 6-inch-tall, moss-like groundcover with tan-colored spikes. These could be one of two plants, both club mosses. Common ground pine, Dendrolycopodium obscurum, is often called princess pine because its growth resembles a miniature forest of fir trees in the leaf litter. Its top branches support a single, cone-shaped, tan-colored spike called a strobilus that holds the plant’s reproductive spores. Princess pine also reproduces by cloning itself from its underground “runners” or rhizomes — modified stems that look like roots.
Princess pine is very easily mistaken for the other club moss, common running cedar, Diphasiastrum digitatum, also called fan club moss. The differences are that the running cedar’s branches are more flattened (like cedar tree leaves), the tops fork to hold several spikes (strobili), and their “runners” are above-ground stems called stolons, which do the cloning work similar to princess pine’s rhizomes.
There are 14 species of club mosses in Maine; the Foxtail Bog-clubmoss is endangered, recorded in only two places in Maine. Club mosses are about 410 million years old, one of the earliest vascular plants to evolve. About 80% of Earth’s plants are vascular. Such plants transport their nutrients via specialized vessels running throughout the plant, like the xylem and phloem vascular tubes in trees. Some club mosses that are now extinct evolved to reach 100 feet tall.
But princess pine, like all club mosses, is not really a moss at all! Mosses are ancient non-vascular plants, more closely related to ferns, liverworts and hornworts, and are roughly 460 million years old — far older than the 230-million-year-old dinosaurs. Mosses obtain and transport water, nutrients and photosynthesized food by absorption, osmosis and diffusion — from cell-to-cell — preferring moist habitats.
Club mosses belong to the botanical genus “lycopodium,” and the spores are called “lycopodium powder” that can be collected relatively easily by knowledgeable folks without harming the plants. This powder has a variety of uses – medicinal, industrial and (surprisingly) theatrical. Lycopodium powder is extremely flammable, due to both the tiny size of the spores and their high oil content. It was used as flash powder in the early days of photography, and is still used in magic acts and for theatrical special effects because the resulting flames are very short-lived, relatively cool, and it’s only flammable when dispersed in air, A pile of lycopodium powder will simply sit there if you put a match to it, but a puff of powder over a candle produces an impressive fireball.
The flammability of lycopodium powder has been known for centuries. In 1806 France, Claude and Nicéphore Niépce chose lycopodium powder as fuel for what became the first patented internal combustion engine — the Pyreolophore — first used to power a boat. About 12 times a minute, a smidgen of lycopodium powder was injected into a stream of air that brought it to a combustion chamber where it was ignited by a smoldering fuse. The expanding gas pushed a piston that forced water out of a tube from the back of the boat, propelling it forward in a series of smooth jerks.
The above video also displays the powder’s hydrophobic property, so is used to coat pills, as a baby power substitute, and to provide a lubricating dust on surgical gloves and other skin-contacting latex goods.
In 1938, Chester Carlson used lycopodium powder to demonstrate a photocopying technique called xerography which, in 1960, led to the first commercial automatic copier, the Xerox 914.
From late summer to early fall, princess pines release their spores to ride on a woodland breeze, landing on fertile ground to begin a new colony. Found in central/eastern United States and Canada, it’s a common plant in our area, but some states’ laws restrict picking it. Because they’re beautifully green and easily harvested, they became a popular component of yuletide decorations, so over-harvesting ensued. These plants grow very slowly — A 100-square-foot colony may take a century to grow. Princess pine can be tricky to transplant into home gardens, so it’s best to just enjoy them where they live in their natural environment.
Foxtail Bog clubmoss: https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mnap/features/lycalo.htm
Fireball demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peL1orGWPn8
Invention of the internal combustion engine: https://photo-museum.org/the-pyreolophore-a-new-engine-principle/
Editor’s note: Did you see something unusual last time you were out in the woods? Were you puzzled or surprised by something you saw? Ask our “Out in the Woods” columnist Kevin McKeon. He’ll be happy to investigate and try to answer your questions. Email him directly at: kpm@metrocast.net
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