Today while I was identifying a moss at the Visitor Information Centre for Lake Kerkini (a wetland of international importance for birds in northern Greece) I fell in love. It was a very pleasant experience.

Mosses are rather small though inherently attractive plants, sufficiently small to be beneath most peoples notice, which is a shame as they are quite amazing. Across the world people relate to them in differing ways. While the Japanese are appreciating their beauty and making moss gardens wherein they assiduously remove all the unwanted higher plants such as grasses and herbs. Their counterparts on another small island on the other side of the great Eurasian land mass are equally assiduously doing the complete opposite.

I have tried, on several occasions to explain to my fellow Englishmen that mosses are something to be enjoyed not an enemy to be routed at all costs, however I have never met with any success. I think I need to approach them before they are so stuck in their ways. Anyway back to the point which was that mosses are small, small as plants that is. If you try looking at individual leaves they rapidly become tiny. Yet this is exactly what is required if unrecognised specimens are to be identified.

To facilitate this I use not one, but two, microscopes. The first, which sits to my right is a low power stereoscope with top as well as bottom lighting. It has magnification powers of times 20 and times 40. This is suitable for looking at insects and similar sized organisms. It is used here is to allow me to prepare a slide for examination under the much higher power compound microscope which resides to my left. To do this I take a shoot of the moss in question, place it under the microscopes viewing area and attack it with a pair of extra fine tweezers. My desire is to remove about half a dozen fully intact leaves and place them into a drop of water on the microscope slide which I have placed for this very purpose at the front of the base of the microscope. When the moss is a largish specimen, growing up to 10 centimetres long, as was today's specimen, which later turned out to be Rhynchostegium murale much as I expected it would, the task is an easy, even pleasant one. However on other occasions when the moss has a total shoot length of 3 millimetres it can prove to be quite a tricky operation, even with the excellent equipment I have available. Once the leaves are all in place and fully immersed in the water drop, not floating on the surface. The buoyantly hemispherical water drop and its contents are flattened to the microscope slide surface with a coverslip. This temporary slide is then moved to the high power compound microscope where it can be viewed.

In passing I should note that while the moss shoot is under the stereo microscope examination is made of its growth form, with particular reference to how the leaves relate to the stem. If the specimen is dried at all it is necessary to wet it to see the whole plant in its most relaxed state. Moss leaves can curl and twist themselves up amazingly if allowed to dry out, however they absorb water very quickly and it is fun to watch them uncurl, a real example of the magic life giving properties of water.

Things look pretty amazing under the stereo microscope, you are getting up close to a world that exists right at the edge of your normal sensory limits. Mosses, insects, spiders and a million other miniature wonders of life become perceivable as entities in their own right. Beings with form, contours and components, colours and separate moving parts. I have never shown anybody anything under a stereo microscope without their eyes opening wide in wonder at the beauty that is unfurled before them.

However when you start working with the high powered compound microscope you are stepping right out of this world altogether. It is like suddenly being transported to another country, everything is different, new, exciting. It is an amazing experience very akin to travelling without having to leave your own front room, and it is real, so much more essential than television, however well made.

So today, there I was moving the slide around with the stage controls examining each leaf to make sure the characters I was recording were the same for each leaf. Mostly this involves observing the form of the individual cells in different parts of the leaf, the shape of the leaf margin, and the condition of the nerve (the moss equivalent of a midrib). Does it reach the end of the leaf, if so does it go beyond, how wide is it in relationship to leaf as a whole etc. There is something magical about looking at a leaf of a moss under this high magnification (times 400) which brings me back to mosses time and again.

Fifteen years ago I built myself a microscope when I was unemployed. I made it from a hand lens, a couple of toilet roll inners, the objective lens from an old and wrecked cinema camera I found on the side of the road, a baked-beans tin and a torch. It was not brilliant, giving me only a single magnification of about times 130, but the world it showed me was magic and I spent hours staring down it at the amazing variation in the leaves of these simple overlooked plants called mosses. I built up quite a collection, unfortunately they, along with my lichen and fungi collections and some of my insects went mouldy in the damp of the old house I lived in when I was in Okehampton, but that is really another story.

Today I was in for a very pleasant surprise because suddenly there was independent movement under the microscope. A small miracle climbed out from under a leaf, took a firm grip of the edge and proceeded to start fishing for his dinner. What I was seeing was a protozoan, one of the reasons I bought my first microscope when I was 14 years old. Cheap microscopes were not much good in those days and it was hard to see anything but this didn't dampen my love of protozoans and the microscopic world in general. I was enraptured by this little guy today as he moved around the leaf. I was certain he was Bdelloid rotifer, probably, as I had come across him in a moss, a species of Mniobia, but without a book I couldn’t be sure.

He moved using a sort inchworm or leach like movement. Holding on with his tail end he reached around with his head end until he found somewhere he approved of, and at times he appeared to be quite fussy. When he was satisfied he took a good hold with his head end and quickly moved his tail end up to his head end. Then he released his hold with his head end and waved it around. If he was happy with what he sensed he stayed still and started whirring the two rings of cilia (short hairs) on his head around. This creates a water current past his feeding aperture where he uses mucus to trap any small particles which might serve as food. If he was not happy he simply moves on again. I watched him for an hour or so, amazed at his beauty and his simple dedication to living.

During this time I also set up a third microscope, the first two belong to the centre, but this one is mine and I have a camera attachment for it. Moving the slide from one microscope to the other was nearly a disaster because at first I could not find him again. He was still there though, and I did find him, carrying on about his everyday life, oblivious to me and my machinations. Happy in a single drop of water. In size he related to the moss leaf, which was about 2 mm long in the same way I would relate to a basketball court.

I took several photos which may or may not come out, but they are really irrelevant. The experience was, is, the important thing and this experience was a very joyous one for me. Eventually however it was time to go and I suddenly had to worry about what to do with this little miracle who had so inspired my day. The area where I had collected the moss was miles away and the rest of the moss was in an envelope to dry with its name, location and date duly recorded for prosperity on the front. I couldn't just clean the slide with a tissue as I normally would, not knowing that this guy was living there and that he would die. During the last hour I had fallen in love with him, I couldn't just murder him.

Yes I know, in an academic sort of way, that small lives such as his come and go in their billions every hour and that I cause the death of loads of living things every day simply by living, as do we all. But when you do not know about it, and when there is nothing you can do about it anyway, it is different, life is what it is after all, it pays little attention to what I think or believe. Then I spotted the large vase with the Arum growing in it. It has nothing but water in it and is a sort of botanical office pet, it would not be thrown out for some considerable time. So there he is, cascaded, in a rain drop, into another world, which to him is much like the last world. I feel better for having spared him surely his life deserved some respect, just as would a bird or a mammal. To have killed him would have sent echoes of condemnation through my soul. Instead he lives his life, for some time at least, still unaware of me and my sense of wonder while I am enriched by his existence as I am by the existence of all living things.