Spring/Summer 2006: Land

Moss

By Robin Wall Kimmerer

My former husband used to teasingly deride my passion for mosses, saying that mosses were just decoration. To him, mosses were merely the wallpaper of the forest, providing ambience for his photographs of trees. A carpet of mosses does in fact provide this lustrous green light. But, focus the lens on the mossy wallpaper itself, and the green blur of the background resolves itself into sharp focus and an entirely new dimension appears. That wallpaper, which seemed at first glance to be of uniform weave, is in fact a complex tapestry, a brocaded surface of intricate pattern. The "moss" is many different mosses, of widely divergent forms. There are fronds like miniature ferns, wefts like ostrich plumes, and shining tufts like the silky hair of a baby. A close encounter with a mossy log always makes me think of entering a fantasy fabric shop. Its windows overflow with rich textures and colors that invite you closer to inspect the bolts of cloth arrayed before you. You can run your fingertips over a silky drape of Plagiothecium and finger the glossy Brotherella brocade. There are dark woolly tufts of Dicranum, sheets of golden Brachythecium, and shining ribbons of Mnium. The yardage of nubbly brown Callicladium tweed is shot through with gilt threads of Campylium. To pass hurriedly by without looking is like walking by the Mona Lisa chatting on a cell phone, oblivious.

Draw closer to this carpet of green light and shadow, and slender branches form a leafy arbor over sturdy trunks, rain drips through the canopy, and scarlet mites roam over the leaves. The architecture of the surrounding forest is repeated in the form of the moss carpet, the fir forest and the moss forest mirroring each other. Let your focus shift to the scale of a dewdrop, the forest landscape now becomes the blurred wallpaper, only a backdrop to the distinctive moss microcosm.

Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do it. Straining to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet. You can look at mosses the way you can listen deeply to water running over rocks. The soothing sound of a stream has many voices, the soothing green of mosses likewise. Freeman House writes of stream sounds; there is the rushing tumble of the stream running over itself, the splashing against rocks. Then, with care, the quiet, the individual tones can be discerned in the fugue of stream sound. The slip of water over boulder, octaves above the deep tone of shifting gravel, the gurgle of the channel sluicing between rocks, the bell-like notes of a drop falling into a pool. So it is with looking at mosses. Slowing down and coming close, we see patterns emerge and expand out of the tangled tapestry threads. The threads are simultaneously distinct from the whole, and part of the whole.

Excerpted from Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003) by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities