December 7, 2008 - Holiday Green
Welcome to the Nature Notebook.

Rising above the leaf litter in an otherwise drab winter forest are what appear to be miniature pine trees. Closer inspection reveals that several of these small green plants are connected along the length of a runner or horizontal stem. Not trees at all, these evergreen plants are club mosses, a group of plants that dates back over 300 million years. Their towering ancestors, reaching heights of up to 100 feet, make up about 90 percent of coal found in Pennsylvania. Spores from living club moss plants were used as flash powders for early box cameras. Club moss is one of the few green plants in the forest this time of year and so was once used to make Christmas wreathes, providing a little bit of green for the holiday season.

This is PPL's naturalist, Jon Beam, with the Nature Notebook for WVIA.