Robin Wall Kimmerer

Magnified tenfold, the complexity and detail of a single snowflake took me completely by surprise. How could something as small and ordinary as snow be so perfectly beautiful?

I think the task given to me is to carry out the message that mosses have their own names. Their way of being in the world cannot be told by data alone. They remind me to remember that there are mysteries for which a measuring tape has no meaning, questions and answers that have no place in the truth about rocks and mosses.

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.

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 wooly 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.

While they may initially seem like arcane technical terms, these words have life to them. What better word for a thick, round shoot, swelling with water than julaceous?

Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.

On the hilltops of my home in upstate New York, the bare gray branches of the maples seem to be traced with a newly sharpened pencil against the winter sky. But in the Willamette Valley the Oregon oaks are drawn in thick green crayon.

Standing in the river day after day, I was becoming vertically stratified myself—shrivelled toes at the bottom, sunburned nose at the top, and muddy in between.

We discovered that Tetraphis is a sequential hermaphrodite, changing its gender from female to male as the colony gets crowded. This switching of gender with population density had been observed in certain fish, but never before in mosses.

They survive in an era of disappearing family farms by a resilience rooted in flexibility, where stability comes from diversity.