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Product Details
Paperback: 168 pages
Publisher: Oregon State University Press (March 1, 2003)
Meeting with good books makes me feel as happy as can be. I learned the name of Robin Wall Kimmerer in the book review of the Japanese Newspaper, in which they introduced a recently published Japanese version of Gathering Moss. Her essays sometimes sound like a maxim of a philosopher, and in other times like a serious warning from an ecologist. Before everything else, she is a naive botanical scientist. She wrote about her excitement when she found evidence about chipmunks' playing important role in diffusing moss. We can understand her delight without any doubt. She says we cannot understand things until we know them by using all of our four aspect; mind, body, emotion and spirit. We only need attentiveness to understand things. Further she points out finding the words is another step in learning to see. Knowing things' name is the first step in regaining our connection with them. Losing their names is a step in losing respect to them, on the contrary.
Mosses are living fossils, inhabitant on surfaces, the amphibians of the plant world, master of their chosen environments, as many as 22,000 species. They lack flowers, fruits, seeds and even roots. Most mosses are immune to death by drying. Desiccation is simply a temporary interruption in life for them. Mosses produce a whole menu of specialized asexual multiplication, their spores are capable of becoming males or females. When the colony gets crowded, moss change its gender from female to male. The intermediate disturbance hypothesis is also applied to mosses. When disturbance occurs at an interval between the extremes diversity of species is highest.
This book tells us not only ecosystem of mosses but also our lives.Read more ›
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If you like true stories of nature, this is for you! I never knew moss could be so interesting! It is a tiny miniature forest and is very fascinating. The book is a well written narrative and fun to read as well as being very educational. I highly recommend it for anyone who loves nature and loves plants!
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You’ll never look at mosses the same again after reading this collection of essays/memoir of mosses. The author is a Native American woman biologist who studies mosses, dividing her time between the Adirondacks and New York. She writes not only about mosses, but also the creatures that appreciate them (besides herself). But this is no boring botany book. Along with the basics abous such things as what moss is, (p 13) “They lack flowers, fruits and seeds and have no roots. They have no vascular system, no xylem and phloem to conduct water internally,” and where they live (p 15) “Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer,” are stories, reflections and memories of these abundant (22,000 species) interesting (well…now they are) plants. Some of her subjects: how the plants reproduce, the importance of the weight of a plant’s reproductive system related to its total weight, specific studies (with and without grad students); ways spores are spread (sometimes including slug transport), and the attempts of a rich but oblivious fan of mosses’ attempts to create his own moss garden of sorts. One of my favorite parts was her explanation about the benefits (well, lack of disadvantages) of allowing moss to grow on your roof instead of killing it off. I’ll have to share that one with my neighbors...In summary, if you don’t want to start to care about moss, don’t read this book! As a person who lives in the Pacific Northwest, I can’t wait to get back out there and take a closer look at these now much more interesting plants. Also good: Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and MacKinnon and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.
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Though I haven't quite finished, this books is a delightful read. The scientific info is not at all over whelming, in fact it's very interesting. Mosses, like so many things, have their own little world within themselves, which is quite amazing to learn about. Whoever expects to find a little critter with an indent down its back where it grows its own little garden moving around in the moss world? It might even be fun to read aloud with a child who is interested in the natural world.
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As moss becomes more popular for shady, moist places in the landscape, people are trying to understand them better. The use of moss, catalogued in this text, makes for fascinating reading, and the pictures are great.
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This book is rapidly climbing to the top of my favorite books of all time. For one thing, Kimmerer has a gift with language. She is both precise and poetic in her descriptions of mosses, her chosen field of study. Yet she is never prosaic, as she allows, thanks to her Native American background, for other dimensions of her subject to emerge. In these elegant essays, she touches on the role of moss in the evolution of plants, the adaptation of moss to city life, the sex life of mosses, and the traditional uses of moss by indigenous people. Kimmerer writes: “Our stories from the oldest days tell about the time when all beings shared a common language—thrushes, trees, mosses, and humans. But that language has been long forgotten. So we learn each other’s stories by looking, by watching each other’s way of living. I want to tell the mosses’ story, since their voices are little heard and we have much to learn from them. They have messages of consequence that need to be heard, the perspectives of species other than our own. “ Her great gift is that she can tell the story of moss both as a scientist and a poet.
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This item: Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
