Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor a moss, but a rootless pineapple relative
The grey beards draped over southern live oaks belong to the bromeliad family, the same group as the pineapple. Spanish moss has no roots, steals nothing from its tree, and is not native to Spain. It drinks from rain and air through scaly leaves, and it vanishes wherever smoke and pollution thicken.
Tillandsia usneoides ranges from the southeastern United States through Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean to northern Patagonia, the widest spread of any bromeliad. Its species name means resembling Usnea, a beard-like lichen it looks like. The plant is a chain of slender stems with curly, scale-covered leaves 2 to 6 centimetres long, hanging in garlands of up to 6 metres and occasionally 8. Tiny red-pink flowers make seeds, but it spreads mostly as fragments blown onto branches or carried off by birds for nests.
It is an epiphyte, not a parasite, and rarely kills its host, though very thick growth can shade the leaves and slow the tree. In the South it favours live oak and bald cypress, whose leaves leach calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus that the moss absorbs. It uses crassulacean acid metabolism to save water. Rat snakes and three bat species shelter in it, and one jumping spider, Pelegrina tillandsiae, has been found nowhere else. Despite its reputation, a study that catalogued thousands of arthropods in it found no chiggers.
Its natural northern limit is Northampton County, Virginia; colonial accounts mention it in southern Maryland, where none grows now. Introduced abroad, it has become a weed in northern Sydney, threatening local forests. In Hawaii, where it arrived in the nineteenth century, it became a lei plant nicknamed after the beard of Sanford B. Dole, head of the Provisional Government.
People have long harvested it. It stuffed mattresses and padded car seats in the early 1900s, and more than 10,000 tons were processed in 1939. It still goes into bousillage, a traditional wall covering, and into nativity scenes in parts of Latin America and Louisiana. In the desert Southwest, pads of dried moss have lined swamp coolers, where water trickling through them cools air pulled in by a fan.
Source: Spanish moss
