A moss you cannot name on the spot is not a lost cause. Take a pinch home, dry it, label it properly, and you have a reference to study at leisure and return to for years, because a dried moss is only sleeping. Wet it and it relaxes back to its living shape under the lens. A shoebox of well-labelled packets is the quiet backbone of learning to tell one moss from another, and it costs almost nothing to build.
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Why a dried scrap is worth keeping
Identification tends to stall in the field. The feature that settles a name, whether the shape of a leaf cell, or a tooth along a margin, or the ring of little teeth round a capsule mouth, wants a lens or a microscope and a steady surface, and you have neither crouched on a wet bank. A specimen lets you finish the work at the kitchen table. It also keeps far better than a pressed flower ever could. Moss shrugs off drying as a matter of course, and a scrap that has sat in an envelope for a decade plumps up within a minute of wetting, close enough to its living self to key out. Specimens in the great herbaria run well past a century old and stay perfectly workable, so what you are building is a reference you can open and read for years.
The pinch, and the label that outweighs it
You need very little: a tuft the size of a coin, taken lightly and from common moss alone, in the spirit of collecting moss responsibly. If the plant is in fruit, gather a few capsules, since the sporophyte often carries the character that clinches a name. The harder discipline is noting where it came from, and doing it on the spot. A green scrap with no data is close to worthless; the same scrap with a full note becomes a genuine record. Put down the date, the place as a grid reference or a plain description, what the moss was growing on, be it rock, bark, soil, mortar or rotten wood, and a word on habitat and aspect, say a shaded stream bank or a sunny wall top facing south. Bryologists have a saying that the label is the specimen. A drawer of anonymous green pinches, which is what I amassed in my first year and later had to bin, teaches you exactly why.
Dry it loose, never under weight
Here moss parts company with the flower press. Flattening a moss crushes the very structure you need to read later, the set of the leaves, the curl of a drying shoot, the swell of a capsule, so leave the press in the cupboard. All the plant asks is to dry slowly in open air. Lay the pinch on a sheet of newspaper, or slip it loosely into a paper envelope, and set it somewhere warm, airy and out of direct sun for a day or two until it is crisp. Do not shut it away while it is still damp, or it will mould in the packet and be spoilt. Nothing beyond ordinary room warmth is called for; an indoor windowsill or an airing cupboard does the job.
Folding a packet
Mosses live in folded paper packets; you do not glue them to card the way a pressed flower is mounted. Take a rectangle of paper, an A5 sheet is ample, and fold it into an envelope: bring the bottom third up, fold the top third down over it, then tuck the two ends in so nothing can slip out. The dried moss sits loose inside and the details go on the front. Plain paper beats plastic, which traps any lingering damp and sweats the specimen. Stand the finished packets upright in a shoebox or a drawer, kept dry, dark and clear of nibbling insects, and they will comfortably outlast you.
Reading it again
To study a stored specimen, tease out a single shoot and drop it into a little water for a minute or two. It uncurls and swells to life-like form, ready for the hand lens or the microscope, and the anatomy that was hidden in the dry state comes clear, the same detail the guides lean on in how to identify moss. When you are done, let the shoot dry again and slip it back into the packet; the whole business takes nothing from the specimen and can be repeated as often as you please. That reversibility is the same trick a whole cushion performs when rewetted, described in reviving dried moss, and it is what makes a moss collection so forgiving to keep. Begin one this winter, label everything the day you pick it, and within a year or two you will hold a reference to your local mosses worth more to you than any book.