Kneel down. Closer than that.

There is a forest on the north side of every stone.

I am thirty years old. I am a graduate student in Oregon, and I study bryophytes, which is to say mosses, and their quieter cousins the liverworts and hornworts. I spend most of my days bent over a hand lens or a microscope, looking at plants that most people step on without noticing. This page is a small hello, and a small argument for looking down.

What a moss is

A moss is one of the oldest kinds of land plant still living. It has no true roots, only fine threads called rhizoids that hold it to bark or stone. It has no flowers and makes no seeds. Its leaves are often a single cell thick, so thin that light passes through them.

The green cushion you see is only half of its life. From it, after rain, rises a thin stalk with a capsule at the tip, and from the capsule come spores, fine as smoke. To make that stalk at all, a moss needs water: its sperm must swim, through a film of rain or dew, to find the egg. Every moss is a small record of wet days.

Many mosses can dry until they are brittle and brown, and wait, sometimes for a very long time, and turn green again within minutes of rain. I have watched it happen under the lens. I do not think I will ever stop finding it astonishing.

There are some twelve thousand kinds of moss in the world. Several of the things we call moss are not mosses at all:

• Spanish moss is a flowering plant, a relative of the pineapple.
• Reindeer moss is a lichen.
• Irish moss is a red seaweed.
• Club mosses are older than the dinosaurs, and closer kin to ferns.

I say this not to correct anyone. Only that names are a way of looking, and it is worth looking twice.

Why small things

People ask me why I did not choose something larger. Trees. Birds. I think it is because a small thing asks more of you. You cannot see a moss from a car window. You have to stop, and kneel, and wait for your eyes to change their scale. When they do, a patch of wall becomes a country, with hills and weather and a population.

Stair-step moss grows one new tier each year, set on top of the last, so you can count back the years down its stem, the way you count rings in a tree. I like a thing that keeps its own quiet calendar.

From the field notebook

I keep my notes in pencil, because pencil does not run in the rain, and here it always rains. My specimens go home in folded paper packets, each one labeled with the place and the date and the tree.

My mother's garden

I grew up in Minnesota. My mother kept a garden behind the house: peonies, a lilac hedge, tomatoes staked with old broom handles. She fought the moss that came up between the flagstones on the shaded side, scraping it out every spring with a butter knife. Every summer it came back.

When I was small I would lie on my stomach on those flagstones and look at it until she called me in. I suppose I have never really gotten up.

She leaves the moss alone now. She says it is for me.

Thank you for kneeling down with me for a while.