Photo by Colette Degarady It’s spooky, romantic, swaying, and quintessentially southern: Spanish moss is a plant shrouded in mystery. What follows is “Spanish Moss 101” a brief course on this fascinating epiphyte.

The plants literally drip from trees. Just about any tree will do, although Spanish moss is rarely seen on pines. The plants are true epiphytes, merely indicating that they grow upon other plants, commonly draped in breezy festoons. The stems are long and thread–like with linear leaves. The plants generally don’t have roots at all and are easily dislodged or blown out of trees. The stems and leaves are covered with tiny, silvery hairs that are good at absorbing water. After rains, the plants are somewhat greenish.

One of the most common misconceptions of this plant is that it is a parasite. In fact, the plants are not at all attached to the interior of their host tree like a true parasite such as mistletoe. Spanish moss is perfectly capable of manufacturing its own food through photosynthesis and has no need to tap into the resources of its host.

Not being a parasite, it does no direct harm at all to the tree on which it occurs, although particularly heavy growths could conceivably block sunlight or cause limbs to break. However, it does require something to grow on, and if it falls onto the ground, it’s doomed. Sometimes it gets itself onto fences or telephone lines, but it doesn’t survive on these very long. It needs a tree. It can be transferred to a tree in a yard, and some people have success in growing it well inland from the coast.

It is not Spanish, although it was associated with Spanish explorers of the New World, especially in FL and the Gulf Coast. The plant is native from VA to Mexico, and through much of Central and South America.

Neither is it a “moss.” In a botanical sense, mosses are non–vascular plants, usually quite small, that reproduce not by flowers and seeds, but by spores (like a fern). Spanish moss is a good flowering plant, and botanists classify it as a “bromeliad” and thus related to pineapple. Like all flowering plants, of course, it makes flowers. The flowers are tiny and very easily overlooked. They have a certain miniscule charm, though, with three tiny yellowish petals, and producing a sweet, delicate fragrance. Following the flowers, slender, elongated capsules ripen to a shiny brown. These split open along three seams, releasing very tiny, fluffy seeds, which float through the warm, magnolia–drenched evenings to lodge in the bark of an accommodating live oak.

Answer to last week’s mystery plant

Silky camellia, Stewartia

malacodendron

Dr. John Nelson is the curator of the USC Herbarium.

To learn more about the Herbarium, call him at

777-8196. His department also offers free plant identification.

www.herbarium.org