Pixie Moss a moss with flowers?

This Saturday the Carolina Butterfly Society is having a field trip to Weymouth Woods Nature Preserve and they will be looking for Pixie Moss, Pyxidanthera barbulata and Brown Elfin butterflies. I've been going out to the perserve and Sandhills Gamelands for 10 years or so, finding this plant in bloom had always been a huge highlight of spring. No it is not a moss at all, did you really think a true moss could have flowers?


Here is some info I gleened from the Center For Plant Conservation on Pixie Moss.

Pyxidanthera barbulata is a diminutive, creeping evergreen sub-shrub that forms dense mats sprinkled with delicate white-pink flowers. Its prostrate growth form and crowded tiny leaves allow the plant to conserve water in the very xeric habitats in which it occurs. Its habitat includes the back-barrier dunes of southern Long Island, throughout the dwarf pine plains of New Jersey, among the last remaining longleaf pine stands of Virginia, to the sandhills of the Carolinas.

Habitat: Pyxidanthera barbulata is found in droughty, acidic sandy soils under an open or thin canopy of pines. Although it is typically described from xeric habitats, the plant is termed a facultative wetland associate (USDA 2001), and listed with keys to aquatic and wetland plants (Godfrey and Wooten 1981). Wells and Shunk (1931) record it from "coarse sand areas of low relief having a high water table for extended periods alternating with depressed water table in drought years." Thus, the plant can tolerate a broad range of hydrological conditions.

Distribution: Pyxidanthera barbulata is recorded from 22 counties in North Carolina, 2 counties in South Carolina, and 3 counties in Virginia (USDA 2001). The status and distribution of this species in New Jersey is uncertain, as reflected in the state rank of S?; however, it is known from at least two sites in Ocean County, NJ.

Above is a Brown Elfin on Pixie Moss.