*1: Trungle Moor, Paul,
1862, WC (OXF) (Paton 1969a:
715).
*2: Near Roche, 1879,
RVT (B) (Paton 1969a:
715).
Grows as scattered plants or in colonies forming
rather open low turfs. Habitat notes from C&S are as
follows. On exposed soil or mud, usually where moist, somewhat
acidic and clayey, silty, loamy or humic. Recorded in
grassland, marshy pastures, flushes and other marshy places,
arable fields (including stubble, maize, brassicas, damp
bulbfields, set-aside), on banks, soil heaps, on woodland
tracks and in clearings, wood-edges, beside water (margins of
pools, a lake, a reservoir, ditch-edges, stream-edges, river
banks), sides of paths and tracks, damp field gateways, in
cliff-top flush. Locally abundant on sediment of inundation
zones at several reservoirs. On clay and gritty soil of bed of
old, flooded china-clay quarry exposed by low water-level
(Cold Harbour); disturbed soil on path in old mine-spoil (one
plant), earthy slope of old mine-spoil, soil dumped on top of
'hedge'. Once on thin soil on bark of felled saplings in pile
of wood. Often in open, but tolerates considerable shade (e.g.
on track in conifer plantation; under old Grey Willow-carr).
Associates recorded include Bryum rubens, Dicranella rufescens,
Dicranella
schreberiana, Dicranella staphylina,
Trichodon
cylindricus, Physcomitrium
pyriforme, Pleuridium acuminatum,
Pleuridium
subulatum, Pohlia
annotina, Pohlia
camptotrachela, Pohlia melanodon, Tortula truncata, less
often Anthoceros
punctatus, Aphanorrhegma patens,
Bryum
klinggraeffii, Bryum sauteri, Ephemerum
minutissimum, Ephemerum serratum, Epipterygium tozeri,
Fissidens
viridulus, Leptobryum pyriforme,
Pleuridium
subulatum, Pohlia
lutescens.
Commonly c.fr. [only recorded with capsules]:
capsules immature 1-7, 9-12; 'dehiscing' [i.e. with ripe
spores] 1, 2, 4-12. Capsules perhaps disperse whole, or rot on
plants (as in Pleuridium acuminatum
q.v.).
