There are as many reasons to love moss as there are people that love it!
Maybe you swoon over it’s refreshing shades of green, or appreciate the soft carpet it makes when you’re tiptoeing through the woods looking for the source of an unfamiliar bird call?
Maybe you love the sound of it’s name whispered in your ear on balmy summer evenings… moss, moss, ferns, moss…
I love moss most for it’s otherness.
Moss is so different from those young whippersnappers, the flowering plants, so different and so wonderful.
It grows in the most unlikely places: tree trunks, asphalt driveways, sidewalk cracks, the sides of waterfalls. It begins growing as a trickle, but can end up covering every surface of a forest with it’s thick furry life force (like in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest!)
Besides which, moss reminds me of home.
I grew up rambling ’round the woods of Northwestern Pennsylvania where the average yearly precipitation is 44″ (more than Portland, Oregon!) Oh, we had moss. We had lots of moss! Probably at the root of it all, that’s why I feel compelled to notice and photograph every nice little patch of moss that I come across here in Wisconsin (average precip., 34″) It’s not really because of the beauty of moss illuminated by slanting morning light (though that’s what I tell myself when I take the picture.)
Moss is important to me because my sense of place is rooted in shady forests of hemlock trees and mossy streams with salamanders hiding under every rock. Moss brings me home, wherever I am.