A good many mosses give up their names only under a lens. This is one of the handful you can call from standing height, once your eye has caught the trick of it. Neat feather-moss (Pseudoscleropodium purum) grows fat, pale and rounded, its shoots looking faintly inflated and combed into a tidy feather, and it ranks among the commonest of our larger grassland mosses. Learn its plumpness and you will spot it on half the lawns and verges you pass.
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The plump, pale shoot
What sets this moss apart is bulk. The leaves are deeply concave, like little cupped scoops, and they press so closely along the stem that each shoot swells into a smooth, rounded, worm-like rope; bryologists call that shape julaceous, and once you have felt a handful of it the word makes sense. Colour helps as much as form. Where most grassland mosses run a wet, glossy green, this one is pale, a soft whitish or yellowish green with a faint bloom to it, so a patch reads lighter than the grass around it even in shade. Bring a shoot to a lens and each blunt, bulging leaf ends in a tiny abrupt point, a short spine set on a broad rounded tip, which is a reliable clincher when colour alone leaves you guessing.
Neatly feathered
The English name earns itself the moment you look at the branching. Side branches come off the main stem at fairly even spacing and roughly even length, laying the shoot out as a regular, blunt-tipped feather rather than the sprawling, patternless weft of its cousin the rough-stalked feather-moss. The main stems are stout, often tinged red, and run anywhere from five to fifteen centimetres through the turf, trailing and turning up at the tips. It is a big moss by British standards, and that combination of size, pallor and orderly feathering is usually enough to settle it before you have knelt down.
Where you meet it
Grassland is its home ground. It thrives in lawns, on road verges and grazed banks, in the damp hollows of coastal dunes and along woodland rides, and it is especially happy on the thin, base-rich soils of chalk and limestone downland, though it puts up with neutral ground almost anywhere. Strongly acid, waterlogged sites are about the only places it thins out. I meet it most on the chalk, where it lies in loose pale drifts among the shorter turf and you can gather a soft double handful without making a dent; on my own lawn it turns up along the shadier edge, plumper and paler than the springy turf-moss it grows beside. If you are working out which mosses share your grass, it sits naturally alongside springy turf-moss as one of the two you are likeliest to be treading on.
Rarely in fruit
Here is an oddity worth knowing: in Britain this abundant moss almost never fruits. With most mosses you wait for the capsule to confirm a name, but this one you must read entirely from the plant itself. That is no great hardship, given how bold the vegetative characters are, though it does put the usual trick of examining a capsule and its ring of teeth out of reach. On the rare occasions it does fruit, the capsule is curved and horizontal on a red stalk, much as in its relatives. For a moss this common to hold back its spores so completely says a lot about how much bryophytes achieve by simply creeping and fragmenting, a theme picked up in how fast moss grows.
Gathered for the flower trade
Long before anyone photographed it for a field guide, this was a moss people gathered by the sackful. Its springy bulk and habit of holding its shape made it a staple florist's and nurseryman's moss, packed round bare roots, worked into wreaths and hanging baskets, and used as green padding wherever something soft and living-looking was wanted. It still reaches the trade, sometimes under older names, and the wider story sits in moss in floristry. Most florist's moss is still stripped from the wild, though, at real cost to the places it comes from, so gather thoughtfully if you gather at all, along the lines of collecting moss.
Growing it, or leaving it be
I have never set out to cultivate neat feather-moss, and I would not push it as a garden project. It belongs to open grassland and settles on its own terms; lift a patch into a pot or a terrarium and it tends to shed the plump pallor that makes it worth having. Its real use in the garden is in a moss lawn you are coaxing along rather than fighting, since it creeps and carpets into walkable cover where a tight cushion would spread too slowly; the practical route is in how to make a moss lawn. Otherwise, just enjoy knowing it. Cross a chalk down or a damp verge, look for the pale fat feathers lying in the turf, and you will have named a moss most people walk straight over.