5 things you didn’t know about hill walking’s most important plant
This unassuming, bright, green or red moss with lush, almost tentacle-like fronds is hiding five well-kept secrets.
It’s called sphagnum, and BMC volunteers have been poking thousands of these little plants into the Peak District bogs over the past three years as part of The Climate Project because it’s so important to hill walking world. Why? There are five things you almost certainly didn’t know about hill walking’s most important plant, and how you can get involved in planting more.
Many thanks to peatlands expert Jenny Bennion from The Wildlife Trusts for the excellent sphagnum information below, sourced from her article here.
1 Pickled sphagnum = peat
Our VIP plant sphagnum has a very specific rider - it can’t perform unless it’s in acidic soil, like the peatbog moorland we love hiking through in the Peak District. We bet you didn't know that sphagnum also helps make the bog as acidic as the vinegar in a jar of pickled onions! Then, as other, taller vegetation grows up through it, the dense carpet of sphagnum mosses in the lower layers gets effectively pickled in peat bog juice. This means the vegetation can only decompose partially and, over time, it compresses to form peat, providing us with vast swathes of wonderful moorland to walk on.
2 Stops flooding
Spongy sphagnum moss absorbs up to 20 times its own weight in water, so it can hold a huge amount rain and prevent flooding naturally. When peat bogs start to dry out or erode, rain runs off the surface and down gullies, washing water and soil out into streams, rivers, reservoirs and lakes at great speed. This creates a real danger of silt build up in waterways and flooding in key walking areas - and we do prefer walking to wading. Thanks for keeping our favourite moorlands accessible for hiking and climbing even in the rain sphagnum!
3 Locks in carbon
Sphagnum-packed peat bogs store a whopping 33% of the world’s soil carbon, which is twice as much as the rainforests! Here in the UK, peatlands make up 12% of our landscapes, but even this stores as much carbon as all of the forests in the UK, France and Germany. The more peat bogs we restore and preserve, the more carbon we can prevent from escaping into the atmosphere. This makes sphagnum vital in the fight against climate change, including the extreme weather conditions that are currently eroding our precious footpaths faster than we can repair them.
4 Boosts wildlife
Healthy peatlands full of sphagnum are home to a huge variety of rare and specialised flora and fauna which really gives a weekend walk or climb a special place in your memory. If you look closely, amongst the 30 UK species of sphagnum mosses, you could spot the insect-eating sundew munching on a fly, or the very rare leek-coloured hawkweed, thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in 2017. Overhead, look out for lapwings, skylarks, golden plovers, endangered curlews, rare hen harriers and even peregrine falcons. If you’re really lucky you could even catch sight of a mountain hare, leaping away, high on the moors.
5 Easy to plant
Sphagnum may be a tough customer when it comes to the pH of the soil, but pop over to the Peak District with these little plants and you’ll find them so, so easy to plant in the bog. Every year, between September and March (avoiding ground-nesting bird season), you can help the BMC plant thousands more of these superhero mosses by volunteering on one of our Get Stuck In events with Moors for the Future Partnership. This year our volunteers have already planted 20,000 sphagnum plugs, a job that can only be done by hand - and we need you to plant more! Will you help? Find out about upcoming events here.
HELP US PLANT SPHAGNUM!
Our latest Get Stuck In sphagnum moss-planting day was on Snailsden Moor, high above Winscar Reservoir in the northern Peak District. BMC Area Rep Peter Judd and five fantastic BMC members volunteered with Moors for the Future Partnership.
Peter says, “The volunteers walked out high onto the moor and worked with Moors for the Future staff to plant sphagnum in places where it might be likely to thrive. They showed us their upland bog restoration work carried out in recent years, including gully-blocking to help slow the run-off of water to re-wet the moorland and make it more habitable for sphagnum moss. We planted every single one of the 3,000 sphagnum plants that the Moors for the Future staff had brought with them - they were very pleased. This is the first of three such opportunities at this same site, the others being 4 Oct and 18 of Oct.”
Find out more about what planting sphagnum is like here and sign up here to volunteer this autumn - more dates are always being added to the calendar.
Will you volunteer with the BMC?
Get Stuck In with the BMC to repair our precious mountain paths
Support the BMC ACT Mend Our Mountains campaign
Path repair is a surprisingly costly business. Working in remote locations with complex equipment and adverse weather conditions makes rebuilding trails an enormous and expensive challenge.
- £5 buys a pair of work gloves
- £10 buys a replacement handle for a mattock
- £25 buys a shovel or suncream & midge repellent for a ranger team
- £50 buys five garden skips for moving soil
- £150 buys protective clothing for path repairers
- £250 fixes approximately one metre of footpath
- £1000 flies ten bags of stone to an inaccessible mountain location
Support the BMC's Access & Conservation Trust Mend Our Mountains campaign to help projects like Get Stuck In repair and maintain the landscapes you love to walk and climb in.
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