Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

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Moss isn't just fascinating for how it lives, spreads, and is used even today, but it becomes a metaphor for life and its struggle for survival. By seeing moss in a new way, we see the challenges to living in a new way too. While the spiritual dimension in this book isn't as immersive as her second book, we follow her experiences as a wife, mother, and scientist in ways that she doesn't reveal in "Braiding Sweetgrass". Kimmerer blends, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet's oldest plants' Guardian Robin Wall Kimmerer is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental and Forest Biology and the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She is the author of the bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass. In this series of linked personal essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. So this book is not really 'a natural and cultural history of mosses', which is what I thought it would be. It is more like the author reflecting on mosses, her life, the meaning of things, and how interconnectivity in biology things (including people and mosses). This book is a series of essays about her life, with mosses playing some role in each.

Kimmerer's linked essays weave personal histories with her research and fieldwork in bryology and forest ecology, and she relates the lives of these small plants into the larger sphere of forests, speaking to the important role they play in temperature regulation, air flow, soil nutrients, etc. Robin Wall Kimmerer is not at all boring to read. These essays on mosses and life are to be read slowly, and savored, or not at all... though, honestly, I find it hard to imagine racing through them. Her style, while not verbose, simply leaves too much in the mind with every paragraph.Shout out to this fabulous book, it made a guest appearance in my latest YouTube Video (all about making fun nature things out of felt). The author truly did a wonderful job explaining the significance of her years of research and experience to a lay audience. In one section the author discusses how two different mosses can inhabit the same log. Ecological theory predicts that coexistence is possible only when the two species diverge from one another in some essential way. This theory made me think of men and women. Maybe the only way that we can coexist is because of our differences, which there are many! But in the case of mosses, she is referring to their reproductive strategy. One moss only grows on top of logs she discovered, because this is a pathway for chipmunks who disturb the area and spread the tiny moss propagules along the way. There are always many parts to a puzzle and how curious that moss and chipmunks are linked together! The thing is, I don't even have a baseline comprehension of nature. I can't say exactly when it all went off the rails... certainly, I spent most of my childhood out of doors, and have vivid memories of the small wood and creek just across the alley behind our house... but I never *learned* anything about what I was seeing. Despite weekly visits to the bookmobile, and almost-daily to the elementary school library, I rarely read scientific nonfiction because it was so BORING. Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.

Mosses are successful by any biological measure - they inhabit nearly every ecosystem in earth and number as many as 22,000 species." The audiobook was extremely well-read - the pacing was spot on and the excitement of the narrator was conveyed perfectly! My own life feels strange, always, but especially now during the pandemic. Gathering Moss was both a respite from the news, and a reminder that Nature isn't and never has been "over there." It isn't separate from us. Our concrete jungle is as much a part of the system as that creek of my childhood. What a heady, terrifying, and reassuring concept. But. Please, please, please save me from overwritten memoirs. Maybe I just don't have a lot of tolerance for memoirs or mixing in human interest stuff (meh, humans) into the study of plants, but I found a lot of the extended metaphors in Gathering Moss (e.g. sexual and asexual reproduction is akin to her neighbor's kids, one of whom has grown up to pursue the same interests while the other has chosen a very different path) to be forced, saccharine, and wordy. I have a degree in plant physiology specializing in water relations, so hearing the water cycle and moss adaptations to preserving water described thus was an eyebrow raising experience:

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Lccn 2002151221 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200092 Openlibrary_edition Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. In these interwoven essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. This was Robin Wall Kimmerer's first book. As noted in my review of "Braiding Sweetgrass", Dr. Kimmerer is a national treasure. Any woman who can write a book on moss that is, and isn't, about moss, can hold the attention of someone who isn't a fan of botany (I couldn't read Pollan's "Botany of Desire" either), and that prompts me to stop on the trail on discovering a patch of moss, just to touch it, has a rare writing gift indeed! I loved this book. Mosses, though... mosses are everywhere. That's how I settled on this title. Even my untrained eye notices moss while running errands on foot, or walking to the dedicated Nature area of town. There's some genuinely great stuff in here about Kimmerer's experience and life long study of moss - sections on tardigrades (squee!), sorrow over illegal moss harvesting and the slow pace of moss regeneration, a moss that grows almost entirely in the dark, and even some excellent dinner conversation material ("The indigestible fiber of mosses has been reported from a surprising location - the anal plug of hibernating bears"). But I'm really not sure whom this book is intended for, as it seems a bit too science-y for those who are casually interested in mosses, and yet too memoir-y for scientists.