Common Name: Ground Pine, Club Moss

Scientific Name:  Lycopodium obscurum  (From Greek lukos meaning wolf and podos meaning foot as the branch tips look like a wolf’s paw; obscurum is Latin for dark and shady which refers to the wooded areas where it grows)

The Lycopodium or Ground Pine is a small terrestrial evergreen that looks like a miniature pine tree with small scaly leaves that grows in patches in shady areas.

Potpourri:  The spores of the Ground Pine give off a flash when ignited. They were therefore used in early photography as a means to create the intense light flash needed for film exposure.  The spores were also used in the pharmaceutical industry as an ingredient in soothing powders for wounds and as a coating to keep pills from sticking together. 

Lycopodium spores are very small and remarkably uniform in size.  They are available in tablets containing about 14,000 spores each. They are used as a known volumetric quantity in aqueous solutions as a means to calculate pollen concentration by counting the number of pollen grains relative to the number of spores in a given area.

The genus Lycopodium and its relatives in the Division Lycopodiophyta or club mosses (such as Diphasisatum complanatum or Ground Cedar) represent one of the most ancient classes of vascular land plants, which evolved about 380 million years ago. Members of this group of plants included giant trees that, along with ferns, were deposited during the Carboniferous Period to form the basis for much of the coal and oil fields that provide most of the energy being consumed in the current Quaternary Period.