Starting with a petri dish

Starting with petri dish and a scrap or two of stuff scraped off a wall, I began my microscopic peerings. In the dish above is a piece of straight grass stem for scale. It is 1mm wide. There are a few grass spikelets kicking about in that dish too.

In one of those scraps of what I think is a plait moss, possibly Cypress-leaved Plait-moss (Hypnum cupressiforme), or possibly Hypnum andoi – I need to see a young capsule to be sure which one, and there weren't any at the moment – I found two liverworts and two other even tinier mosses. I've identified the liverworts. One I have found before at the base of Boggy Brae wild cherry tree last year. It is Bifid Crestwort (Lophocolea bidenta). The two teeth referred to in its name are easy to see in the following three pics:

Bifid Crestwort (Lophocolea bidenta) (1)

On the right: Bifid Crestwort (Lophocolea bidenta) (2)

Bifid Crestwort (Lophocolea bidenta) (3)

The liverwort new to me is Forked Veilwort (Metzgeria furcata) and it looks like this:

Forked Veilwort (Metzgeria furcata) 1

Showing the clear forking of
Forked Veilwort (Metzgeria furcata) 2

Forked Veilwort (Metzgeria furcata) 3

You can see in the third of those pics how the length of the veilwort leaves (or thalluses as they are more properly called) would catch my attention next to the moss leaves underneath.

Here are a couple of pics of one of the very tiny mosses. I don't know its name yet.

I added a blob of water to the petri dish overnight and had great fun playing with microscopic images of water surface tension the next day. Separate post for that here.