Science demands that we understand a subject on our own terms many Native American traditions urge us to understand all forms of life on their own terms. Kimmerer, Associate Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, interweaves the biological life histories of many different genera of mosses with recollections from both her own life and her native culture’s traditions. In this she succeeds marvelously in ways that are not only scientific but philosophical and poetic as well.ĭrawing upon both her professional training as a bryologist (a botanist who specializes in the study of mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) as well as her ancestral heritage from the Potawatomi nation, Dr. These last messages, along with a solid, introductory account of their natural history, are what Robin Wall Kimmerer seeks to convey to the reader in her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.

Yet to those who would stop, even if only briefly to consider them, mosses are as fascinating as they are ancient. At worst they are reckoned, often by home-owners, as the bane of house roof longevity and well-groomed lawns something to be killed and removed whenever possible. By most people they are scarcely noticed at best simply acknowledged as that fuzzy green stuff filling in sidewalk cracks and clinging to the bark of trees.

Mosses – too small to be seen in detail without a strong hand lens and existing in a layer of atmosphere surrounding all terrestrial objects that is too subtle for our crude senses to perceive, they flourish throughout the world playing roles in the global ecosystem that we are only beginning to understand.

Robin kimmerer books