“Since that momentous colonization of land 450 million years ago, when the first moss set leaf on rock, everything on Earth has changed. All those species, entire phyla–gone. And yet, the mosses are still here, their contemporary form indistinguishable from their fossil ancestors. They have drunk from the fountain of youth, or maybe the fountain of longevity, flourished beneath a sky of pterodactyls, and flourish today under a sky of weather satellites that tell us the oceans are rising and the ice caps are melting.
All things pass away. Oh, lovely, cool shaded maples, towering pines, waving grass, and extravagant lilies, will you, too, pass away in this overheated greenhouse, yielding to the ones who are yet to come?
…At this time of the sixth extinction, might we stop wringing our hands long enough to sit quietly at the feet of the ones who have avoided every era of extinction since the dawn of life on land?”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Ancient Green: Moss, Climate, and Deep time”
Related articles i’ve written
The Year of the Yellowjacket; or, Vespula Vespers; or, Underworld Negotiations and my Nervous System
An autumn poem I wrote is featured on the Little Bluestem Poetry Page
Dark Night of the Soil: Restoring the Human-Humus Relationship
Kinky Roots: What Tree Transplanting and Trauma Can Teach Us
Meet the Mushrooms: Giant Puffballs
Meet the Mushrooms: Chicken of the Woods
If you use Instagram, I do occasionally update my “plants&flowers” highlight reel with plants I am currently tending or am excited about.
Useful Links
Free Botany resource from Herbalista
The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe
How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene by Natasha Myers
Propagating native plants from seed
on my reading shelf as of late:
The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins; Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians by Gladys Tantaquidgeon; The Radiant Lives of Animals by Linda Hogan; Changes in the Land by William Cronon; Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide by Andrea Olsen; Forgotten Fires by Omer C. Stewart; This Very Ground, this Crooked Affair: A Mennonite Homestead on Lenape Land by John L. Ruth; Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America; Healing the Land by Reclaiming an Indigenous Ecology: A journey exploring the application of the Indigenous worldview to invasion biology and ecology and its implications for the future of ecological management and food security by Jennifer Grenz
