Demystifying Moss: What Is the Point of It, Anyway?
Demonized by lawn fanciers, prized by florists, and tweezered by show garden specialists, the lowly moss carries a lot of baggage—when it is noticed at all.
After a weekend gaping at moss in the mountains of Snowdonia, northern Wales, I found my copy of Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and decided to give it the attention it deserves.
Photography by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
Stone walls and fallen trees in Snowdonia make a perfect habitat for every kind of moss.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of the influential Braiding the Sweetgrass) is a Citizen of the Potawatami Nation.
“Mosses inhabit surfaces… that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact.”
One of the more shocking chapters of the book describes the desolation left by moss harvesters who sell their foragings to the horticultural industry.
Prized mosses develop in tandem with a tree; they can only get a foothold on the knobbly twigs and leaf scars of young growth, with moss attracting more moss.
Mosses are “undisputed masters of their chosen environment.”
In a deciduous forest like this one in Snowdonia (inhabited mainly by pygmy oaks), mosses could not survive under the avalanche of leaves in autumn, so they make their home on higher planes.
“Watch a moss, dry and crisp, swell up with water after a thunderstorm.”