One of rarest plants in UK 'flowers' after 130 years

A rare moss that lives only on very old stone walls in the Yorkshire Dales has "flowered" for the first time in more than 130 years.

Mosses do not produce flowers but they do have fruiting bodies that develop spores after sexual reproduction between male and female plants.

The previous time the endangered Nowell's limestone moss was seen with fruiting bodies was in 1866 soon after it was first discovered by a local amateur botanist, John Nowell.

Scientists from Bradford University and the Natural History Museum in London have confirmed that the moss is fruiting for the first time in living memory, raising hopes that the spores will help the moss to spread to newer walls in the Dales. Fred Rumsey, a plant diversity researcher at the museum, said Nowell's moss was one of the rarest plant species in Britain, having a range restricted to a few of the oldest stone walls dating back hundreds of years.

"Of the 500 moss patches we measured and recorded in the Dales, we found just one small area fruiting – a discovery that gives us a great opportunity to slow down, and possibly even halt, the extinction of a very interesting, but mostly overlooked species," Dr Rumsey said.

The fruiting patch was found on the slopes of Penyghent Hill in the Yorkshire Dales with male and female plants growing and intermingling in close proximity, which almost certainly helped to trigger the event.

"Locating the moss was very exciting, but even more so when we realised it hadn't been able to reproduce successfully all these years because the moss patches, which are either male or female, just haven't been close enough to each other to reproduce," he said.

The scientists are now working on ways of moving the male and female mosses closer to each other in the hope that they will begin to produce more fruiting bodies and more spores that could spread to newer stone walls been built over the past century.