Types Of Mosses

Plant life distinct to the southern Blue Ridge

The elevations of the southern Blue Ridge province above 4,000 feet can be thought of as a peninsula of northern terrain extending into the southeastern United States, where typical flora and fauna of northeastern and southeastern North America intermingle. Through a combination of processes, the province has evolved into the mature upland landscape we know today. It has become especially diverse in two regards: plant life and distinctive natural areas.

According to B. Eugene Wofford’s Guide to the Vascular Plants of the Blue Ridge (1989), the province presently features upwards of 1,500 vascular plants: trees, shrubs, vines, herbs, sedges, grasses, ferns, horsetails, quillworts, and club-mosses. Many are considered to be showy plants when in flower. There are 130 species of trees, whereas in all of Europe there are only 75 or so species. The primitive non-vascular plants include countless moss and lichen species. And the province is one of the epicenters in the temperate world for mushrooms.   

Before the introduction about 1910 of a non-native fungus that decimated the American chestnut trees, the prototypical forest here was “chestnut-heath;” that is, chestnut was the dominant canopy tree, with an understory mainly made up of shrubs such as rosebay rhododendron, mountain laurel, and other members of the heath family. Before the arrival of the fungus, 30 percent or more of the deciduous forests in the province were made up of chestnut. Almost all of the trees seen in the province now are root sprouts that persist despite the fact that their main trunks have died back to ground level. Within a few years, almost all of these sprouts succumb to the fungus before they can flower and fruit. Today, the prototypical forest of the province is “oak-heath.”

The Blue Ridge is a mosaic of varied habitats, large and small: grassy and heath balds, marshes and bogs, periglacial boulderfields, beech gaps, seepage slopes and cliffs, oak orchards or wind forests, and more. The forest types of the present-day southern Blue Ridge include the spruce-fir or Canadian zone above 5,500 feet. It shares characteristics with evergreen forests in eastern Canada and features the most boreal-like climate in the southeastern United States. The conifers that predominate are red spruce and Fraser fir. The latter is being infested and killed by the balsam wooly adelgid, an introduced aphid pest.

Between 4,000 and 6,000 feet, the northern hardwood zone shares characteristics with the “north woods” of New England. But note that Michael P. Schafale and Alan S.

types of mosses

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