Eight things the smallest plants quietly pull off.

Sphagnum, the moss that builds peat bogs, is mostly empty cells that act like sponges; dried out, it can soak up around twenty times its own weight in liquid, far more than cotton. It is also mildly acidic and antiseptic, slowing bacteria. So in the First World War, when cotton ran short, hospitals dressed wounds with millions of sphagnum-moss pads gathered straight from the bogs.

Peat is simply moss that died and never fully rotted, piling up in waterlogged bogs over thousands of years. Although peatlands cover only about 3 percent of the world's land, the carbon locked in that ancient, half-decayed moss adds up to roughly twice the amount stored in every forest on Earth combined, around 550 billion tonnes, making bogs the planet's biggest carbon store on land.

When a body sinks into a sphagnum bog, the dead moss releases an acidic compound that tans skin into dark leather, while the acid and lack of oxygen halt decay. That is how the Tollund Man, found in Denmark in 1950, survived about 2,400 years so intact that the peat-cutters who unearthed him thought they had stumbled on a recent murder, his stubble and eyelashes still in place.

Many mosses simply switch off when they dry out instead of dying. They can sit crisp and brown for years, then, within minutes of the first rain, unfurl and turn green again as photosynthesis restarts. One herbarium specimen of the moss Syntrichia, kept dry in a museum drawer for more than twenty years, sprang back to life the moment it was finally moistened.

Sphagnum launches its spores with an air gun. Each round capsule dries and shrinks until the pressure inside blows the lid off with a pop, firing spores upward at around 100 kilometres per hour. High-speed film, shot at up to 100,000 frames a second, revealed the blast spins a tiny vortex ring, a smoke-ring of air, that carries the spores high enough to catch the wind and travel.

Goblin gold, or luminous moss, grows in caves, hollows and dim crevices where almost nothing else survives. Its surface cells are shaped like tiny lenses that gather faint light and focus it onto chloroplasts deep inside; the green light they do not absorb bounces straight back out. So the moss seems to shine with an eerie emerald shimmer in the gloom, though it is only reflecting the little light there is.

The grey beards draping southern oak trees look mossy, but Spanish moss is actually a flowering plant in the pineapple family, a cousin of the fruit. It is an air plant: it grows no roots into the tree and takes nothing from it, instead pulling water and dust straight from the humid air through tiny scales on its threads. It simply drapes over the branches for somewhere to sit.