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My neighbor keeps calling moss a fungus and I finally snapped at a cookout in Boise | Botany Lovers - Thought Shares

My neighbor keeps calling moss a fungus and I finally snapped at a cookout in Boise

So my neighbor Dave has this gorgeous moss patch in his yard, right, and at his cookout last Saturday he told like 8 people it was a fungus, and I couldn't hold it in anymore. Moss is a plant, a real one with chlorophyll that makes its own food, while fungus can't do that at all, it has to break stuff down and absorb it. I know this because I killed about $60 worth of ferns and moss trying to grow them in full sun near my garage 2 summers ago before I figured out moss has no roots, just little thread anchors called rhizoids that hold it down. That's why it loves shade and damp spots, it soaks water straight through its leaves instead of pulling it up from the ground like grass does. Dave said the green fuzzy stuff on his tree was the same thing, but that's lichen, which is a fungus and algae living as roommates, totally different setup. I didn't want to be that person at a party, but he was about to go buy some spray for it and I had to stop him. Has anyone else gotten into it with a neighbor over plant stuff, or am I the only one who ruins cookouts now?

1 comments

1 Comment

michaeltorres1mo ago

Dave's lucky you spoke up before he sprayed, because that stuff he was about to buy would've killed the moss and probably stained his siding too. Here's the part nobody at the cookout brought up: moss is older than roots. Way older. It was doing its thing on land before plants figured out how to build root systems at all, which is why it still looks like a green carpet instead of growing up tall like everything else. So when Dave calls it a fungus, he's not just wrong about what it is, he's wrong about it by like 400 million years. You didn't ruin the cookout, you saved him from a landscaping mistake and a biology one at the same time.