MOSS, or Mosses, in botany. See MUSCI.
Moss on Trees, in gardening. The growth of large quantities of moss on any kind of tree is a distemper of very bad consequence to its increase, and much damages the fruit of the trees of our orchards.
The present remedy is the scraping it off from the body and large branches by means of a kind of wooden knife that will not hurt the bark, or with a piece of rough hair cloth, which does very well after a soaking rain. But the most effectual cure is the taking away the cause. This is to be done by draining off all the superfluous moisture from about the roots of the trees, and may greatly be guarded against in the first planting of the trees, by not setting them too deep.
If trees stand too thick in a cold ground, they will always be covered with moss; and the best way to remedy the fault is to thin them. When the young branches of trees are covered with a long and shaggy moss, it will utterly ruin them; and there is no way to prevent it but to cut off the branches near the trunk, and even to take off the head of the tree if necessary; for it will sprout again: and if the cause be in the mean time removed by thinning the plantation, or draining the land and stirring the ground well, the young shoots will continue clear after this.
If the trees are covered with moss in consequence of the ground's being too dry, as this will happen from either extreme in the soil, then the proper remedy is the laying mud from the bottom of a pond or river pretty thick about the root, opening the ground to some distance and depth to let it in; this will not only cool it, and prevent its giving growth to any great quantity of moss, but it will also prevent the other great mischief which fruit-trees are liable to in dry grounds, which is the falling off of the fruit too early.
The mosses which cover the trunks of trees, as they always are freshest and most vigorous on the side which points to the north, if only produced on that, serve to preserve the trunk of the tree from the severity of the
north-winds, and direct the traveller in his way, by always plainly pointing out that part of the compass.