Big and Small

I started reading Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees at the same time I started listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss. Preston’s book is about the discovery and exploration of “the vertical Eden” of coastal redwoods. Kimmerer’s book is about her fascination with and study of mosses of North America.

You might say, Who cares? Well, what’s kind of crazy is that Kimmerer is crawling on hands and knees to observe mosses that blanket the forest floor. Meanwhile, the tree climbers in Preston’s book discover the same mosses in the redwood canopy. How cool is that?

The diversity and dexterity of the plants in our world is becoming increasingly fascinating to me. I’ve enjoyed taking photos of flowers for a long time. I became more personally interested in (invested in?) gardening as our children went off to school and I had more time to play in the dirt with purpose. When I was picking my first New York City apartment, one of my top three criteria was, “It has to be on a street with trees.” Now, living in Wyoming, I’m enjoying 10×10 foot plot I have at the community garden. This year I’m thinking about dividing my “bit of earth”, to borrow a phrase from The Secret Garden, between veggies and flowers. There’s nothing quite like the peppery taste of a cherry tomato still warm from the sun or a small posey of flowers picked from the garden. I’m also trying to learn more about the vegetation that sustains such diverse wildlife. I want to know the chokeberries and serviceberries that feed the wildlife in the fall.

What does all this have to do with anything? Probably nothing, except that the discovery — for me — that there are the same mosses living in the sky as there are on the ground was amazing. Did you know the polarity of water molecules facilitates water distribution in redwoods and mosses — pulling water up the redwoods’ enormous vertical structures and through adjacent plant surfaces to mitigate evaporative forces in mosses? It makes me appreciate how much I don’t know. I feel like celebrating the complex and beautiful world we live in, more and more every day. I want to look and see better. I need to learn more. I am recommitting every day to engaging with Nature with “wonder and humility”, as Rachel Carson hoped we all would.