Field Notes––

Ancient Origins Of Princess Pine

By Dottie Evans

Feeling a bit old around the edges these days? Is the sawdust starting to leak out the seams?

Welcome to the club. We all know time is passing and we’re not getting any younger.

Here’s a remedy to take your mind off transient sufferings like flood, fire, and bodily aches and pains: Try thinking about something else that is much, much older than any of us.

Going back some 300 million years, there was a group of nonflowering plants whose descendents have survived to the present. They are the club mosses –– aka princess pine, ground cedar, horsetail, or fairy pine –– those six-inch-high evergreens with trailing stems and erect shoots that grow in damp woods where no plow or bulldozer has disturbed the ground.

Club mosses seem so insignificant. A little bit of green poking out from the brown of last year’s leaves. But they are ancient beyond imaging. Reproducing by spores, their ancestors in evolutionary time preceded flowering plants by 200 million years.

Called lycophytes, the 11 or so species of club mosses that we know today are descended from giant, 100-foot-tall treelike plants that filled the Carboniferous forests before the Age of Dinosaurs. They hark back to the Age of Coal, when the earth was a much warmer place covered over by lush green growth.

The next time you are striding purposefully through the woods, slow down and look down. You might see princess pine growing by the side of the trail. Ignore that arthritic knee and get down to eye-level with it. You’ll see it’s not unlike a miniature pine tree, and a whole clump resembles the primeval forest.

Think Jurassic Park and earlier.

If you are old enough (antiquity does have its benefits) recall the Life Magazine issue of 50-plus years ago that featured Rudolph Zallinger’s fabulous 110-foot-long dinosaur mural as he painted it from 1943 to 1947 on the walls of New Haven’s Peabody Museum. In 1952, this Pulitzer Prize-winning painting was published for Life’s series on evolution called The World We Live In.

As a small child growing up in Minnesota, I was far removed from New Haven and that dinosaur mural, but I vividly remember poring over the painting reproduced on a pull-out fold of my parents’ Life Magazine.

The alien landscape looked oddly familiar. I could not stop staring at those towering vegetative forms and the arching palm fronds sticking out from pineapple stumps of ancient cycads. Volcanoes spewed lava and an armadillo-type beast scurried for cover as tyrannosaurus rex with tiny fore-claws and the ferocious red eye reared back on huge haunches before crunching down the hapless stegosaurus. A triceratops looking like an elephant wearing a helmet watched from a safe distance.

If I had known, I might also have identified those giant, fernlike trees painted into the background as ancient club mosses. They were the precursors of greenery we gather today for our Christmas wreathes or holiday door hangings. We harvest them without regard for their venerable genealogy.

Because they are becoming more rare in our increasingly urban woods, club mosses are protected now in many states. Perhaps we should enjoy them where they are and leave them be. Only think about how long they have been on this earth, and what that means in the greater scheme of things.

A passing glimpse of princess pine is like a bit of the Paleozoic in our midst. Now the aches and pains may not matter so much.