THE PLANT COVER
Like the pattern of the commons, their vegetation is also concentrically arranged. At the heart of each of Dartmoor's two plateaux is a substantial area of blanket bog underlain by up to two metres of peat in the north and characterised by cotton grass, deer grass, rushes and bog mosses (mainly sphagnum). Surrounding them in a figure-of-eight are peaty soils, often waterlogged, bearing heath, with ling dominant, and grass moorland where purple moor grass gives it a raffia-like colour in winter. Outside that is a narrower and more variable zone of patches of vegetation, some occupying whole commons, dominated by gorse or bracken or short-cropped grass often with some heathers - all suggesting better and drier soils.
