UAmong the plants that surround us in everyday life, mosses are far behind in last place when it comes to attention and recognition. We plant and protect trees, admire wildflowers, pictures of ferns with their leaves curling up adorn many walls, grasses provide grain and are also important for garden parties and football games. But mosses? Who even knows one by name? Every weekend in Germany, countless homeowners kneel in their driveways and scrape moss out of the cracks if they don’t reach for the chemical club right away, and even passionate nature lovers usually overlook the green moss cushions on stones, bark and the forest floor on their excursions.
The Canadian biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who became known to a large audience through her bestseller “Braided Sweet Grass – On the Wisdom of Plants”, is therefore pursuing an ambitious goal with her new book. It is necessary to polish the reputation of the mosses. The book, printed in moss green, leads the reader along a winding narrative path to the question of how it was possible that these plants were so consistently overlooked and not always held in the highest esteem.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: “The Gathering of Moss”. A story of nature and culture.
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Image: Matthes & Seitz Verlag
Kimmerer writes her natural history narrative in different roles. On the one hand, she appears as a moss expert, i.e. as a bryologist, as she researches and teaches at the State University of New York. In this role, the author explains in a way that is easy to understand and embedded in personal stories, what distinguishes mosses, how they are structured, how they live, how they reproduce, how important they are in many ecosystems and what research questions they raise.
Water collector of many habitats
Mosses, we learn, were among the first real land plants 350 million years ago and have remained pioneers ever since. They developed the female gender as a basic attitude and were the first to develop a reproductive technique that all other plants use today: “The egg remains protected in the female part instead of being exposed to water.”
Instead of being dependent on bodies of water, mosses collect their water themselves from air and rain through an elaborate structure – which makes them something like the water suppliers of many habitats. In the form of peat mosses and the bogs they form, they store carbon dioxide as well as water. Mosses thus play an important role in the fight against global warming, also on a global scale. Peatlands store more carbon than forests. For this reason, more and more attention is being paid to the protection of remaining moors and the renaturation of former moor areas.
Moospolster key
Interwoven with the scientific explanations, Kimmerer also appears as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, an indigenous community in North America. “Indigenous knowledge rests on the principle that you do not understand anything until you have grasped it in all four aspects of your existence: mind, body, emotion and spirit,” she writes in the introduction about this perspective. Kimmerer takes her readers on excursions, touching mosses and letting their presence sink in. Empathy also comes into play. “What art of waiting do the mosses practice while they’re roasting, crumpled up, on the summer oaks?” she writes. “They curl up like they’re daydreaming. And if mosses actually dream, then probably about rain.” Science and ecological poetry are balanced overall in this book.
The variety of perspectives from which the mosses are viewed makes reading extremely entertaining. In one chapter, Kimmerer explores how it is possible that not much can be found about mosses in the researched tradition of indigenous herbal medicine. Until she traces an answer: With their absorbent power and a certain antibacterial effect, mosses have found an important use, especially among indigenous women, namely as sanitary pads. And as such, they had little chance of being documented by mostly male western ethnologists.
Cool growth
In another chapter, Kimmerer tells how she was once hired as an advisor to a wealthy builder who wanted to see an old-looking natural landscape, complete with moss-covered stones, laid out for his luxury villa on a spacious plot in no time at all. But mosses cannot be settled quickly on bare rock, it takes time.
“The Gathering of Moss” combines a very personal perspective – the reader even learns about the relationship between the author and her daughter who has just moved out – with profound knowledge of a part of the plant world that is so often overlooked precisely because it is so ubiquitous. After reading it, reaching for the scraper or spraying device to make mosses disappear from cracks is almost impossible. Especially since, as Kimmerer explains, mosses on stones, roofs and facades do not have the feared decomposing effect. In times of climate change, they could act as welcome water reservoirs and cooling systems for buildings.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: “The Gathering of Moss”. A story of nature and culture. Translated from the English by Dieter Fuchs. Matthes & Seitz Verlag, Berlin 2022. 223 p., hardcover, €32.