Botany 101 Part 2

I know I wasn’t stoned when I was sweeping the roof yesterday.  Aside from chance being a fine thing, there are certain laws you don’t want to break when you’re on a roof and as far as I’m concerned the most important of these is gravity.

So, no, I wasn’t stoned. I’m therefore not sure why or how I could have imagined that, in addition to sweeping the pine needles off, there was no need to de-moss the roof. Went back up ladder this morning planning to clear out the gutters. Perhaps, if I ended up feeling ambitious, washing the skylights, too. As soon as I got on the roof it was obvious to me that de-mossing was not optional. Back down the ladder to fetch the scraper.

I’ll be honest. Until I started weeding the path I hadn’t given moss a lot of thought. I could sum it up thus: moss is green stuff that grows where the sun does not shine. If you’d told me it was caused by alien spores this would have sounded like as good an explanation as any other.

Happily, this is not my roof.

Moss can be quite attractive in many circumstances, although not on your roof, where, left to grow untamed, it will eventually lift the tiles off the roof, which will cause a leak, which will result in a large bill for retiling the roof. So, not good on a roof.

Weeding the garden path I realised, as reported yesterday, that moss sprouts on wet, mushy pine needles. (Source still a mystery. I could look it up. Or I could stick with the alien spore theory.) As I was scraping large patches of moss off the part of the roof where the sun does not shine, I turned one patch over and what should I see? Pine needles!

Why have I never put this together in my head before? Previously the only connection I’d made between the moss on my roof and the pine trees surrounding the house was that the trees blocked the sun which encouraged the moss. I did not see dead pine needles blown onto the roof as the source of the problem.

Why did no one ever teach me this fascinating fact in a science class?

Okay, to be fair, perhaps someone did try to teach me some less fascinating version of this fact and it just didn’t take in my head. I know we took some form of botany. I vaguely remember having to memorise the names of flower parts.  The only things I remember from all the science lessons I took in school are the laws of gravity and inertia, and throwing up in the dissect-a-frog biology class. (Not my fault the teacher didn't believe me when I said I had to go to the toilet now. )

 Anyway... Roof now de-mossed and gutters cleared. Skylights will have to wait for another day. There is a gin and tonic calling my name.