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Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer's book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings, from salmon and hummingbirds to redwoods and rednecks. Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.
Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.
Gathering Moss will appeal to a wide range of readers, from bryologists to those interested in natural history and the environment, Native Americans, and contemporary nature and science writing.
168 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2003
3402 people are currently reading
55796 people want to read
About the author
Robin Wall Kimmerer
26 books6,962 followersDr. Robin Wall Kimmerer (also credited as Robin W. Kimmerer) (born 1953) is Associate Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). She is the author of numerous scientific articles, and the book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She is Potawatomi and combines her heritage with her scientific and environmental passions.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,120 reviews
May 8, 2022
Robin Wall Kimmerer write more books challenge
November 30, 2025
"There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents."Dr Kimmerer takes us on a walk through the wild, intricate and utterly unforgettable world of mosses.
She has spent years studying one of the smallest plants on earth - mosses.
Mosses are incredibly common but often shuttled into the background. They aren't towering like trees or flowering like plants but they are uniquely beautiful and infinitesimally complicated.
"Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells."
She draws comparisons between her life experiences and the secret lives of mosses.
This book is wonderfully written and provides such an incredibly perspective on a hidden world.
I am a HUGE fan of in depth looks into the mundane and this one was no exception!
"Our stories tell us that the Creator gave these to us, as original instructions. The foundation of education is to discover that gift within us and learn to use it well."
I've noticed a tendency when scientists explain their research that it feels almost incomprehensible to the outsider...but that was never the case.
The author truly did a wonderful job explaining the significance of her years of research and experience to a lay audience.
Her love for her subject shown through and truly made this book a delightful read!
The audiobook was extremely well-read - the pacing was spot on and the excitement of the narrator was conveyed perfectly!
All in all, this book was absolutely fabulous!
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February 4, 2013
I just finished reading Gathering Moss and it was a lovely surprise. Not what I was expecting. I was expecting lots of pieces of science detailed and separate. What I got was one whole. A story, woven together with moss. I love this book and I love moss! I see it everywhere. As I'm walking across a gravel pathway at work....there it is! As I lift my eyes to gaze at the trunk of a tree....it's there too! As I look at at a distant stand of Maple and see a green fuzz, it's too early for leaves....could it be moss? I betcha. It's on my roof, under my feet and over my head! So prevalent that we don't notice it any more. So it was with joy that I read Gathering Moss and began to really see it, this diminutive perfect plant. The author teaches with simple instruction as well as analogy. It was easy to discover the world of moss in these 162 pages. But now I want more! Suddenly I need their names, and it seems hard, as I've never identified individual mosses before. Ms. Kimmerer, can you come out to Seattle for a field identification seminar? She says: Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do it. Straining to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet. You can look at mosses the way you can listen deeply to water running over rocks. The soothing sound of a stream has many voices, the soothing green of mosses likewise.
The author has a beautiful way with words. She speaks of moss and rocks in the beginning. Within the circle of stones, I find myself unaccountably beyond thinking, beyond feeling. The rocks are full of intention, a deep presence attracting life.....The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet yielding to a soft green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces, grain by grain bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.
She reminds us that: Mosses are so little known by the general public that only a few have been given common names. Most are known solely by their scientific Latin names, a fact which discourages most people from attempting to identify them. I'm one of those people. Moss names have always been distant and out of reach. Not part of our vocabulary like salal or mahonia. Where have you been hiding dicranum, fissidens, tetraphis??? Let's start at the beginning. Definition. A true moss or bryophyte is the most primitive of land plants. Mosses are often described by what they lack, in comparison to the more familiar higher plants. They lack flowers, fruits, and seeds and have no roots. They have no vascular system, no xylem and phloem to conduct water internally. they are the most simple of plants, and in their simplicity, elegant. I found it very interesting that mosses are much more susceptible to air pollution damage than are higher plants.
Robin Kimmerer tells us the almost impossible, that most mosses are immune to death by drying. For them, desiccation is simply a temporary interruption in life. Mosses may lose up to 98 percent of their moisture, and still survive to restore themselves when water is replenished. It's like a plant with a little bit of magic. And turns out to be very useful. Native Americans used mosses for diapers and sanitary napkins. Magic diapers! Remember that, moms, if you find yourselves out in the woods in a pinch.
This book will also introduce you to the astounding world of the waterbear, or tardigrade. A tiny animal, .5 mm in length, that roams the water ways of the mosses, sucking out the contents of the moss cells. When the moss dries out, they do as well, going into a period of suspended animation. In this state they can withstand desiccation, freezing, boiling, radiation and things that most life on earth can not. They are unbelievable!
In one section the author discusses how two different mosses can inhabit the same log. Ecological theory predicts that coexistence is possible only when the two species diverge from one another in some essential way. This theory made me think of men and women. Maybe the only way that we can coexist is because of our differences, which there are many! But in the case of mosses, she is referring to their reproductive strategy. One moss only grows on top of logs she discovered, because this is a pathway for chipmunks who disturb the area and spread the tiny moss propagules along the way. There are always many parts to a puzzle and how curious that moss and chipmunks are linked together!
I fully appreciate her answer to the homeowner who complains about moss in their lawn. They always want to kill it. Robin responds mosses cannot kill grasses. They simply haven't the ability to outcompete them. Mosses appear in a lawn when conditions for moss growth are better than conditions for grass growth. Too much shade or water, too low a pH, soil compaction--any of these things can discourage grasses and let the mosses appear. Killing the mosses would not help the ailing grass in any way. Better to increase the sunlight, or better, pull out the remaining grass and let nature build you a first-rate moss garden. Hear hear!!!
Ms. Kimmerer poses a thought provoking question at the end of the book. She reminds us of all the things that plants provide for us and asks: In the web of reciprocity, what is our special gift, our responsibility that we offer to the plants in return? I know what plants give to me, food, shelter, beauty, life, but I don't often ponder what I can give to the plants in return. A clean earth? Less pollution? Reduce, reuse, recycle? I guess I can do all those good things not just for me, but for our planet and for the plants as well. Interesting how similar those two words are, plant and planet, one is the other. She answers her question with these passionate words; Our ancient teachers tell us that the role of human beings is respect and stewardship. Our responsibility is to care for the plants and all the land in a way that honors life. We are taught that using a plant shows respect for its nature, and we use it in a way that allows it to continue bringing its gifts....We can live in such a way that our thoughts of respect and gratitude are also made visible to the world.
The author has a beautiful way with words. She speaks of moss and rocks in the beginning. Within the circle of stones, I find myself unaccountably beyond thinking, beyond feeling. The rocks are full of intention, a deep presence attracting life.....The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet yielding to a soft green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces, grain by grain bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.
She reminds us that: Mosses are so little known by the general public that only a few have been given common names. Most are known solely by their scientific Latin names, a fact which discourages most people from attempting to identify them. I'm one of those people. Moss names have always been distant and out of reach. Not part of our vocabulary like salal or mahonia. Where have you been hiding dicranum, fissidens, tetraphis??? Let's start at the beginning. Definition. A true moss or bryophyte is the most primitive of land plants. Mosses are often described by what they lack, in comparison to the more familiar higher plants. They lack flowers, fruits, and seeds and have no roots. They have no vascular system, no xylem and phloem to conduct water internally. they are the most simple of plants, and in their simplicity, elegant. I found it very interesting that mosses are much more susceptible to air pollution damage than are higher plants.
Robin Kimmerer tells us the almost impossible, that most mosses are immune to death by drying. For them, desiccation is simply a temporary interruption in life. Mosses may lose up to 98 percent of their moisture, and still survive to restore themselves when water is replenished. It's like a plant with a little bit of magic. And turns out to be very useful. Native Americans used mosses for diapers and sanitary napkins. Magic diapers! Remember that, moms, if you find yourselves out in the woods in a pinch.
This book will also introduce you to the astounding world of the waterbear, or tardigrade. A tiny animal, .5 mm in length, that roams the water ways of the mosses, sucking out the contents of the moss cells. When the moss dries out, they do as well, going into a period of suspended animation. In this state they can withstand desiccation, freezing, boiling, radiation and things that most life on earth can not. They are unbelievable!
In one section the author discusses how two different mosses can inhabit the same log. Ecological theory predicts that coexistence is possible only when the two species diverge from one another in some essential way. This theory made me think of men and women. Maybe the only way that we can coexist is because of our differences, which there are many! But in the case of mosses, she is referring to their reproductive strategy. One moss only grows on top of logs she discovered, because this is a pathway for chipmunks who disturb the area and spread the tiny moss propagules along the way. There are always many parts to a puzzle and how curious that moss and chipmunks are linked together!
I fully appreciate her answer to the homeowner who complains about moss in their lawn. They always want to kill it. Robin responds mosses cannot kill grasses. They simply haven't the ability to outcompete them. Mosses appear in a lawn when conditions for moss growth are better than conditions for grass growth. Too much shade or water, too low a pH, soil compaction--any of these things can discourage grasses and let the mosses appear. Killing the mosses would not help the ailing grass in any way. Better to increase the sunlight, or better, pull out the remaining grass and let nature build you a first-rate moss garden. Hear hear!!!
Ms. Kimmerer poses a thought provoking question at the end of the book. She reminds us of all the things that plants provide for us and asks: In the web of reciprocity, what is our special gift, our responsibility that we offer to the plants in return? I know what plants give to me, food, shelter, beauty, life, but I don't often ponder what I can give to the plants in return. A clean earth? Less pollution? Reduce, reuse, recycle? I guess I can do all those good things not just for me, but for our planet and for the plants as well. Interesting how similar those two words are, plant and planet, one is the other. She answers her question with these passionate words; Our ancient teachers tell us that the role of human beings is respect and stewardship. Our responsibility is to care for the plants and all the land in a way that honors life. We are taught that using a plant shows respect for its nature, and we use it in a way that allows it to continue bringing its gifts....We can live in such a way that our thoughts of respect and gratitude are also made visible to the world.
February 23, 2018
Mosses are the final frontier for most botanists. We start with the easy stuff - trees, shrubs, and flowers - and then level up into grasses, sedges, and rushes. But mosses are uniquely daunting, as there are really no beginner books and even basic taxonomy requires a microscope.
Gathering Moss will probably not teach you any mosses. There's a handful of line illustrations of different mosses, but no photos or tips for ID. Instead, it's a collection of essays linked by the subject of moss but ranging widely in topic, from the author's research on a particular aspect of moss ecology to memoir-y reflections on moss and heritage, parenthood, life.
I enjoyed, well, parts of this book. As a plant biologist, I loved the essays on Kimmerer's field work. Published studies are so often the result of grueling, uncomfortable, mishap-ridden days in the field, yet we rarely get to hear the full stories of how a scientist observed, tested, re-tested, re-observed something enough to come to a meaningful conclusion. They are often funny stories in retrospect, and Kimmerer, who worked on a site that required her to be chest high in water for hours at a time, writes:
This rings so true as a description of how data is actually collected and science advances, millimeter by millimeter. And the author's findings about ecological tolerance and competition amongst mosses are interesting as well. Kimmerer avoids a lot of specialized bryophyte terminology and writes about her research in a way that lay readers will easily understand. I enjoyed the more science-oriented essays a lot, even though I cringed at the experiment that involved using plastic beads on a study site to mimic seed dispersal. Even at a polluted site, surely adding more plastic waste isn't the answer?
But. Please, please, please save me from overwritten memoirs. Maybe I just don't have a lot of tolerance for memoirs or mixing in human interest stuff (meh, humans) into the study of plants, but I found a lot of the extended metaphors in Gathering Moss (e.g. sexual and asexual reproduction is akin to her neighbor's kids, one of whom has grown up to pursue the same interests while the other has chosen a very different path) to be forced, saccharine, and wordy. I have a degree in plant physiology specializing in water relations, so hearing the water cycle and moss adaptations to preserving water described thus was an eyebrow raising experience:
Good grief, woman. Does everything have to be anthropomorphized? Moss does not think, wait, or feel. I also hate how it takes Kimmerer so damn long to get a simple idea across because she's busy, as my friend would put it, #tryingtowritegood. It's not poetic. It's not required for vibrant science writing. It's just irritating. And my skeptic hackles rose when, in her essay on indigenous uses of mosses, she blithely claims, "It's well known that a medicinal plant frequently occurs in the vicinity of the source of the illness," which sounds about as dubious as the medieval conviction that foods that looked like particular organs were beneficial for that organ.
There's some genuinely great stuff in here about Kimmerer's experience and life long study of moss - sections on tardigrades (squee!), sorrow over illegal moss harvesting and the slow pace of moss regeneration, a moss that grows almost entirely in the dark, and even some excellent dinner conversation material ("The indigestible fiber of mosses has been reported from a surprising location - the anal plug of hibernating bears"). But I'm really not sure whom this book is intended for, as it seems a bit too science-y for those who are casually interested in mosses, and yet too memoir-y for scientists.
The best thing I have to say about Gathering Moss, and it is probably worth a full star on its own, is that since reading it, I have been paying far closer attention to the mosses living unobtrusively around me and thinking that yes, perhaps a home microscope would be a worthwhile investment after all.
Gathering Moss will probably not teach you any mosses. There's a handful of line illustrations of different mosses, but no photos or tips for ID. Instead, it's a collection of essays linked by the subject of moss but ranging widely in topic, from the author's research on a particular aspect of moss ecology to memoir-y reflections on moss and heritage, parenthood, life.
I enjoyed, well, parts of this book. As a plant biologist, I loved the essays on Kimmerer's field work. Published studies are so often the result of grueling, uncomfortable, mishap-ridden days in the field, yet we rarely get to hear the full stories of how a scientist observed, tested, re-tested, re-observed something enough to come to a meaningful conclusion. They are often funny stories in retrospect, and Kimmerer, who worked on a site that required her to be chest high in water for hours at a time, writes:
In the evenings I'd transcribe the tapes, converting my recorded litany to real data. I wish I'd kept some of those tapes, just for entertainment value. In between the hours of droned numbers were bursts of inspired cursing as the canoe started to drift away, tightening the microphone around my neck. I recorded any number of squeals and frantic splashes when something nibbled at my legs. I even had tape of an entire conversation with passing canoeists who handed me a cold Leinenkugels Ale as they floated by.
This rings so true as a description of how data is actually collected and science advances, millimeter by millimeter. And the author's findings about ecological tolerance and competition amongst mosses are interesting as well. Kimmerer avoids a lot of specialized bryophyte terminology and writes about her research in a way that lay readers will easily understand. I enjoyed the more science-oriented essays a lot, even though I cringed at the experiment that involved using plastic beads on a study site to mimic seed dispersal. Even at a polluted site, surely adding more plastic waste isn't the answer?
But. Please, please, please save me from overwritten memoirs. Maybe I just don't have a lot of tolerance for memoirs or mixing in human interest stuff (meh, humans) into the study of plants, but I found a lot of the extended metaphors in Gathering Moss (e.g. sexual and asexual reproduction is akin to her neighbor's kids, one of whom has grown up to pursue the same interests while the other has chosen a very different path) to be forced, saccharine, and wordy. I have a degree in plant physiology specializing in water relations, so hearing the water cycle and moss adaptations to preserving water described thus was an eyebrow raising experience:
The atmosphere is possessive of its water. While the clouds are generous with their rain, the sky always calls it back again with the inexorable pull of evaporation. The moss isn't helpless; it exerts its own pull to counter the powerful draw of the sun. Like a jealous lover, the moss has ways to heighten the attachments of water to itself.
Good grief, woman. Does everything have to be anthropomorphized? Moss does not think, wait, or feel. I also hate how it takes Kimmerer so damn long to get a simple idea across because she's busy, as my friend would put it, #tryingtowritegood. It's not poetic. It's not required for vibrant science writing. It's just irritating. And my skeptic hackles rose when, in her essay on indigenous uses of mosses, she blithely claims, "It's well known that a medicinal plant frequently occurs in the vicinity of the source of the illness," which sounds about as dubious as the medieval conviction that foods that looked like particular organs were beneficial for that organ.
There's some genuinely great stuff in here about Kimmerer's experience and life long study of moss - sections on tardigrades (squee!), sorrow over illegal moss harvesting and the slow pace of moss regeneration, a moss that grows almost entirely in the dark, and even some excellent dinner conversation material ("The indigestible fiber of mosses has been reported from a surprising location - the anal plug of hibernating bears"). But I'm really not sure whom this book is intended for, as it seems a bit too science-y for those who are casually interested in mosses, and yet too memoir-y for scientists.
The best thing I have to say about Gathering Moss, and it is probably worth a full star on its own, is that since reading it, I have been paying far closer attention to the mosses living unobtrusively around me and thinking that yes, perhaps a home microscope would be a worthwhile investment after all.
August 3, 2007
ok. so i'm obsessed with moss. but it helps that kimmerer is an excellent nature writer, passionate about her topic, but smart enough to keep it personal and interesting. she made me want to shrink down and live in a forest of moss.
August 20, 2024
As the thin book sits well under 200 pages, I figured I’d breeze through this collection of essays and learn a thing or two about mosses along the way.
That’s not how it worked. Interlaced in this collection are perspectives drawn from scientific field work, countryside living, Indigenous culture, and more. While the main focus remains mosses — what are they, where are they, and how did they get there? — this publication delivers reams of anecdotes in a conversational tone that inspired me to slow down. So I didn’t blaze through this. Every other day, I savoured a chapter or two with my morning coffee and let the stories sink in, instead.
I drew great pleasure from the comments this book elicited from fellow readers as I went along; they were often funny. This is a far cry from the literary fiction I usually favour, and out of all things vegetal, mosses in particular may not be an obvious reading choice, either. I get that. But plants have been a topic of particular interest ever since I was able to crawl — as were rocks, birds, fish, and all things natural — and while my Goodreads record doesn’t show it, I’ve read an awful lot of plant books in this lifetime. So why mosses? Well, why not? My lifestyle nowadays is almost purely urban, but I grew up surrounded by the sea on one side and a forest on the other, in a place crisscrossed by all manners of rivers, lakes and low mountains; at that Canadian latitude, mosses and lichens were everywhere. Did I observe them up close? Did I notice differences between them, like whether they favoured rocks or tree bark? You bet. I was single-digit years old and deeply involved with this stuff, already.
To read about mosses as an adult, far removed from childhood memories and favourite haunts, brought about a whiff of that fresh, green smell mossy spots usually carry. As a bonus, I learned way more than just “a thing or two” during my time with Gathering Moss. Some chapters — on peat bogs, on stratified moss communities running up a cliffside, on the challenges in recreating a mossy ecosystem — proved fascinating, sometimes unexpectedly.
“Looking at mosses adds a depth and intimacy to knowing the forest. Walking in the woods, and discerning the presence of a species from fifty paces away, just by its color, connects me strongly to the place. That certain green, the way it catches the light, gives away its identity, like recognizing the walk of a friend before you can see their face.”
Thanks to my friend Robyn for sending this my way; this was an inspired, lovely pick — and a definite keeper.
That’s not how it worked. Interlaced in this collection are perspectives drawn from scientific field work, countryside living, Indigenous culture, and more. While the main focus remains mosses — what are they, where are they, and how did they get there? — this publication delivers reams of anecdotes in a conversational tone that inspired me to slow down. So I didn’t blaze through this. Every other day, I savoured a chapter or two with my morning coffee and let the stories sink in, instead.
I drew great pleasure from the comments this book elicited from fellow readers as I went along; they were often funny. This is a far cry from the literary fiction I usually favour, and out of all things vegetal, mosses in particular may not be an obvious reading choice, either. I get that. But plants have been a topic of particular interest ever since I was able to crawl — as were rocks, birds, fish, and all things natural — and while my Goodreads record doesn’t show it, I’ve read an awful lot of plant books in this lifetime. So why mosses? Well, why not? My lifestyle nowadays is almost purely urban, but I grew up surrounded by the sea on one side and a forest on the other, in a place crisscrossed by all manners of rivers, lakes and low mountains; at that Canadian latitude, mosses and lichens were everywhere. Did I observe them up close? Did I notice differences between them, like whether they favoured rocks or tree bark? You bet. I was single-digit years old and deeply involved with this stuff, already.
To read about mosses as an adult, far removed from childhood memories and favourite haunts, brought about a whiff of that fresh, green smell mossy spots usually carry. As a bonus, I learned way more than just “a thing or two” during my time with Gathering Moss. Some chapters — on peat bogs, on stratified moss communities running up a cliffside, on the challenges in recreating a mossy ecosystem — proved fascinating, sometimes unexpectedly.
“Looking at mosses adds a depth and intimacy to knowing the forest. Walking in the woods, and discerning the presence of a species from fifty paces away, just by its color, connects me strongly to the place. That certain green, the way it catches the light, gives away its identity, like recognizing the walk of a friend before you can see their face.”
Thanks to my friend Robyn for sending this my way; this was an inspired, lovely pick — and a definite keeper.
July 1, 2020
This read has now become one of my favorite nature books (next to Braiding Sweetgrass by Kimmerer as well of course!) But really! This book was a bit dense in scientific terms (that I often had to pause to look up), but it served as an incredible well of knowledge on mosses, the habitats they create, the plants & animals they assist, & the relationship we have with them. I especially enjoyed Kimmerer’s words on the impact deforestation has on moss & how even leaving “straggler trees” behind to “regenerate the mosses” will never be a viable option if there are no groves to assist with shade & moisture collection. She wrote about the lack of ethical harvesting in the moss industry, logging industry, & landscaping industry. I loved those chapters the most because my partner Finley & I would really love to buy land that we can rehabilitate in the future. Hearing directly from a bryologist (bryology is the study of moss) about how to *ethically* grow moss in those environments & introduce them back into a landscape was really helpful for me. I learned SO MUCH from this book, but the #1 thing I want to share is that moss is one of our most helpful companions in the natural world. It filters our water & our air, provides a carpeted home for seed growth, insulates logs to make homes for slugs & mycorrhizae, houses so much life inside just a muffin-sized handful, & should be protected as well as admired by us humans. I now walk through the woods looking for the hair of Dendroalsia on tree trunks, the tangled tufts of Rhytidiadelphus on stumps & logs, the swaying curtains of Neckera on branches, & many more moss friends that color the world around me.
July 24, 2025
Me conmueve mucho como una plantita, a veces olvidada, otras robada, otras pisada, puede hacer tanto por la tierra que pisamos. Este libro de ensayos me hizo recordar la importancia de observar atentamente nuestro entorno y abrazar los seres vivos con los que compartimos el planeta, pero sobre todo autocontenerme y tratar de vivir como los musgos, que no toman más de lo que necesitan y son en cambio increíblemente generosos, ser un pedacito pequeño de una comunidad y cambiar la sociedad en la que habitamos. Tqm a Robin Wall Kimmerer.
April 2, 2020
So this book is not really 'a natural and cultural history of mosses', which is what I thought it would be. It is more like the author reflecting on mosses, her life, the meaning of things, and how interconnectivity in biology things (including people and mosses). This book is a series of essays about her life, with mosses playing some role in each.
I liked the parts about moss. I liked the parts where she describes experiments that she/ her graduate students have done/ are doing. I like her descriptions of the secret mossy meadow and the rainforest. Something was missing though. I think I wanted more actual mosses and less emotion/ spirituality.
This book is for people who like walking in nature, knowing the names of moss species, and want to read essays mostly about spirituality/ the shortcomings of science/ the connection between parts of nature.
I liked the parts about moss. I liked the parts where she describes experiments that she/ her graduate students have done/ are doing. I like her descriptions of the secret mossy meadow and the rainforest. Something was missing though. I think I wanted more actual mosses and less emotion/ spirituality.
This book is for people who like walking in nature, knowing the names of moss species, and want to read essays mostly about spirituality/ the shortcomings of science/ the connection between parts of nature.
July 13, 2023
4.5 stars
Who would have thought moss could be so interesting? And Kimmerer has such a soothing voice, the audiobook is really meditative and I listened at a slower than usual speed. Highly recommend anything by her- she expertly blends plant science with personal anecdotes, cultural commentary and more. Really lovely.
Who would have thought moss could be so interesting? And Kimmerer has such a soothing voice, the audiobook is really meditative and I listened at a slower than usual speed. Highly recommend anything by her- she expertly blends plant science with personal anecdotes, cultural commentary and more. Really lovely.
October 22, 2025
For me, moss is one of the greatest things to look at and especially to touch. I remember last year being on a hike and just happy and carressing all of the moss I was coming across. So it was really lovely to listen to a book that's all about moss, narrated by the ever-lovely, warm and compassionate voice of Robin Wall Kimmerer that feels soothing to my soul in the moment.
Just like Braiding Sweetgrass, this is about way more than moss, this is a lovely little book that's about how we interact with nature and how all of the elements work together to give us their gifts and their lessons. I absolutely love Kimmerer as a storyteller.
There's also dark here (how couldn't there be, considering everything that's happening?), like the almost dystopian chapter about a rich guy trying to have his employees moss up a rock in his garden so that it looks weathered (chilled me to the bone). And an interesting part about how a lot of humans try to kill moss, especially when it grows on their houses, because having a pristine house, sans nature, has some sort of moral value in their minds. Thanks, I hate it. While listening to this I was looking at pictures of mossy forests and on duckduckgo the 5th picture was from an article about how to remove moss from your house. I'm not a misanthrope, but gosh, humans can be absolute shits.
Just like Braiding Sweetgrass, this is about way more than moss, this is a lovely little book that's about how we interact with nature and how all of the elements work together to give us their gifts and their lessons. I absolutely love Kimmerer as a storyteller.
There's also dark here (how couldn't there be, considering everything that's happening?), like the almost dystopian chapter about a rich guy trying to have his employees moss up a rock in his garden so that it looks weathered (chilled me to the bone). And an interesting part about how a lot of humans try to kill moss, especially when it grows on their houses, because having a pristine house, sans nature, has some sort of moral value in their minds. Thanks, I hate it. While listening to this I was looking at pictures of mossy forests and on duckduckgo the 5th picture was from an article about how to remove moss from your house. I'm not a misanthrope, but gosh, humans can be absolute shits.
September 10, 2024
While commenting on buddy Charles' reading status of Gathering Moss, I remembered a song I heard in my late teens at an advanced video lesson at language school where I studied English. It was just an introductory song to the lesson's theme, about natural life. The song had a folk/new age/hippie feeling to it and its lyrics were like the following:
I’m linked to the river, my brother is the moss that crosses the rock
And we’re all connected by a scheme no one remembers.
And life is more than mc2, life is more than mc2
In this exquisite book on mosses, Kimmerer gave me the sense of this song. In the book's introduction, she already states that she would present the themes objectively and subjectively, considering her upbringing, scientific experience, and Indigenous ancestry. At first, I had a foot back about the way she had chosen to write it, but it proved a good idea, there is nothing magical here, but a scientist does also have to rely on intuition to find answers sometimes, just like Isaac Newton and the so-called falling apple experiment. Looking, paying attention, allowing not only your scientific knowledge to guide you, but the ancestral experiences achieved by common knowledge, and also allowing nature to give you the answers when you are open to it. And maybe, what might be the most important thing: not being so dogmatic about something that you close your eyes to the rest of the world. I say so because I've read in many instances scientists who have such a narrow vision, who consider that the sole experience valid is the human experience, based on reason alone, thus disregarding a whole lot of other species' experiences in such a world that thrives with so many ways of life expression.
Moss might be one of the first attempts of life to leave the aquatic world into the land, and if so, it thrived beautifully! A forest rich with moss might take centuries to be formed, housing such a diversity of life, and yet we, rational humans, in the blink of an eye, destroy it in minutes, all to commodify nature for wealth and artificiality.
Kimmerer has such an interesting style of writing that you know you're reading about science but you start every chapter with an interest in exploring her accounts and experiences even further. The closest I felt like this was while reading the amazing Ed Yong An Immense World.
I’m linked to the river, my brother is the moss that crosses the rock
And we’re all connected by a scheme no one remembers.
And life is more than mc2, life is more than mc2
In this exquisite book on mosses, Kimmerer gave me the sense of this song. In the book's introduction, she already states that she would present the themes objectively and subjectively, considering her upbringing, scientific experience, and Indigenous ancestry. At first, I had a foot back about the way she had chosen to write it, but it proved a good idea, there is nothing magical here, but a scientist does also have to rely on intuition to find answers sometimes, just like Isaac Newton and the so-called falling apple experiment. Looking, paying attention, allowing not only your scientific knowledge to guide you, but the ancestral experiences achieved by common knowledge, and also allowing nature to give you the answers when you are open to it. And maybe, what might be the most important thing: not being so dogmatic about something that you close your eyes to the rest of the world. I say so because I've read in many instances scientists who have such a narrow vision, who consider that the sole experience valid is the human experience, based on reason alone, thus disregarding a whole lot of other species' experiences in such a world that thrives with so many ways of life expression.
Moss might be one of the first attempts of life to leave the aquatic world into the land, and if so, it thrived beautifully! A forest rich with moss might take centuries to be formed, housing such a diversity of life, and yet we, rational humans, in the blink of an eye, destroy it in minutes, all to commodify nature for wealth and artificiality.
Kimmerer has such an interesting style of writing that you know you're reading about science but you start every chapter with an interest in exploring her accounts and experiences even further. The closest I felt like this was while reading the amazing Ed Yong An Immense World.
September 15, 2019
"Mosses are successful by any biological measure - they inhabit nearly every ecosystem in earth and number as many as 22,000 species."
Kimmerer's linked essays weave personal histories with her research and fieldwork in bryology and forest ecology, and she relates the lives of these small plants into the larger sphere of forests, speaking to the important role they play in temperature regulation, air flow, soil nutrients, etc.
Mosses inhabit this sphere of common yet unnoticed living things. Silent observers. There's wisdom and experience here, for a plant that has witnessed millenia of life. Kimmerer taps into this deep wisdom, sharing stories of her own life as a mother, as university professor, as a Potawatomi native woman.
Her macro approach (the ecology) notes the other life's that rely and use mosses - the snails (as beds), the tree seedlings (as nutrient base), the birds (as lining for nests), the bears (digestives), and the humans (myriad of ways!). There's a particularly insightful essay "The Web of Reciprocity: Indigenous Uses of Mosses" that relates how indigenous groups have used mosses for bedding, for baby diapers, for menstrual padding, for bindings, for food additives.
If you are familiar with Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, this earlier book is very similar in style and tone. Thoughtful and respectful to both history and ecology, highly educational, and delightful to read and ponder.
Kimmerer's linked essays weave personal histories with her research and fieldwork in bryology and forest ecology, and she relates the lives of these small plants into the larger sphere of forests, speaking to the important role they play in temperature regulation, air flow, soil nutrients, etc.
Mosses inhabit this sphere of common yet unnoticed living things. Silent observers. There's wisdom and experience here, for a plant that has witnessed millenia of life. Kimmerer taps into this deep wisdom, sharing stories of her own life as a mother, as university professor, as a Potawatomi native woman.
Her macro approach (the ecology) notes the other life's that rely and use mosses - the snails (as beds), the tree seedlings (as nutrient base), the birds (as lining for nests), the bears (digestives), and the humans (myriad of ways!). There's a particularly insightful essay "The Web of Reciprocity: Indigenous Uses of Mosses" that relates how indigenous groups have used mosses for bedding, for baby diapers, for menstrual padding, for bindings, for food additives.
If you are familiar with Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, this earlier book is very similar in style and tone. Thoughtful and respectful to both history and ecology, highly educational, and delightful to read and ponder.
February 8, 2024
It took me a little longer to get into this one than Braiding Sweetgrass, mainly because I had much less personal knowledge of mosses than the larger types of plants which Kimmerer wrote about in Sweetgrass. It doesn't help that mosses do not have common names, so are referred to mainly by scientific names, and I was rarely able to picture them well in my head. However, by about a third of the way through I had fallen into the miniature world of mosses and the striking and insightful ways Kimmerer links them to all other organisms in their ecosystems. I loved learning how mosses, like tardigrades, with which they probably co-evolved, can survive desiccation and be revived by water even after all seeming signs of life have disappeared. I was intrigued by the story of a moss species which changes its gender over its lifespan, starting out producing only female reproductive stalks in its early days, shifting producing a mix of male and female stalks as it matures, and then producing solely male stalks as the patch reaches peak density. I was frustrated by stories of the illegal moss harvesting which is stripping Oregon rain forests bare. And I was once again completely charmed by the beauty and generosity of Kimmerer's writing and worldview. She's a bestseller for a reason; I highly recommend everyone pick up at least one of her books at some point.
August 12, 2022
Heartbreaking, informative, intensely interesting, and joyous, all at the same time. This author is truly talented. I’m so thankful she read her own work for the audiobook version. She is amazing. My only regret after reading this book is that I do not yet have my own favorite type of moss. This is a huge problem that I hadn’t known I even had until now.
March 14, 2025
Ja sa poserem! Práve som zistila, že ženy v minulosti používali vysušený mach ako plienky pre bábätká a vložky, pretože niektoré druhy dokážu udržať až dvanásťnásobok svojej vlastnej hmotnosti vo vode. Mach zároveň odvádza vlhkosť z pokožky, a jeho drobné suché častice pôsobia takmer ako detsky puder, vďaka čomu zostáva pokožka hladká a suchá???! A moč absorbujú a uzatvoria v nejakom machovom obale. Vzhľadom na tieto vlastnosti, ako aj na mierne kyslé pH a údajný obsah malého množstva jódu, môže mach pomáhať predchádzať zapareninám a podporovať ich hojenie? I mean I know nothing about science ale ja budem taka eko mama, ak toto vyskusam a bude to pravda, ja sa poserem
Predrazene biodegradable pads I am so onto you
Predrazene biodegradable pads I am so onto you
June 2, 2015
Final verdict was... finished it, but only because I'd started it.
The moss information was fascinating. Would have read a lot more of that. The rest was built like a collection of standard "life story" essays from a beginner's writing workshop. And I have read far too many of those already.
Too, there was enough bad punctuation to be distracting.
The moss information was fascinating. Would have read a lot more of that. The rest was built like a collection of standard "life story" essays from a beginner's writing workshop. And I have read far too many of those already.
Too, there was enough bad punctuation to be distracting.
March 1, 2018
This is not a cultural history, it's a memoir. This is not a natural history, it's a treatise on bullshit. Aside from a few beautiful turns of phrase and a very interesting discussion of tetraphis reproduction, this book is a groveling paean to New Age-y hippie nonsense hellbent on arguing the claim that indigenous spirituality is an equivalent (or superior) system of knowledge when compared to the scientific method. Rather than discuss actual examples of Native American brilliance, Kimmerer is content to pretend that magic is the driving force behind understanding the natural world.
June 20, 2020
I cannot express how happy I am to have finally picked Kimmerer's work up. Her writing is beautifully descriptive and all-enveloping, deeply personal and yet insightful in the ways of the broader world. Proportionally, Gathering Moss has more straight scientific writing than Braiding Sweetgrass, more factual descriptions of mosses and the role that they play in their surrounding ecosystems. But you can really see Kimmerer practicing the narrative style that comes to define Braiding Sweetgrass, braiding nature writing with memoir and cultural history. It's a grounding read that somehow also had me daydreaming of lush forests and carpets of moss.
I can already tell this is going to be a continuous reread and a book I would definitely recommend!
I can already tell this is going to be a continuous reread and a book I would definitely recommend!
February 4, 2014
I love it when book leads on to book, as way leads on to way. Gilbert made the briefest mention of this book in her credits for "The Signature of All Things", recognizing Kimmerer as the real collector of mosses. And brilliantly, my very own library (Belk Library, Elon U) had a copy right on the shelf. Trust me - this is magically written, and will also introduce you to award-winning Scrabble words like seta, protonema, gemmae. I could read over and over again Chpt 2 about "Learning to See". Kimmerer's Native American sensitivity to the delicacy and strength of mosses is wonderful, and she sees all as part of "the sacred life of the world."
March 18, 2022
DNF.
Jesus christ all I wanted was to read about moss. I dont care about your life, lady. Stop hiding the interesting facts between your daily anecdotes. I just got into the habit of skipping the first few paragraphs of every chapter.
Jesus christ all I wanted was to read about moss. I dont care about your life, lady. Stop hiding the interesting facts between your daily anecdotes. I just got into the habit of skipping the first few paragraphs of every chapter.
June 21, 2021
3.5 stars
November 24, 2023
Mossy Morass: Kimmerer's Contradictions
Kimmerer writes poetically about mosses and their ecology. She connects them back to indigenous practices and tries to approach the plant from fresh perspectives in order to understand them better. She presents many facts about mosses and shares her process for making new discoveries about them.
All of this is interesting and useful on its face. But Kimmerer takes her own poetry and indigenous knowledge as gospel. The quotes below show how she makes hyperbolic claims and contradicts herself: maligning science even as her work fits within it; praising indigenous knowledge even as it offers unfalsifiable claims as the truth; seriously comparing moss transplanting to the slave trade; lambasting ownership as destruction of nature while remaining uncritical of her own practices; calling scientific names arbitrary even as she happily imparts them to her students; urging scientific study of mosses before making conclusions even as she uses anecdotal evidence to argue a conclusion.
By far the biggest problem with the book is Kimmerer's contradictory, confused, and shallow criticism of science:
This is a gross oversimplification. Much of the scientific method is centered around watching experiments play out, sometimes over generations, in order to review what happened. In the next paragraph, she doubles down on this biased and unhelpful view of science:
First off, the course of scientific discovery has relied heavily on this exact process of decomposing wholes into parts and observing phenomena at different scales. Much of it has been unintuitive, but all of it has simply extended the human perspective—not supplanted it with the "stories" or "experiences" of organs, cells, molecules, and atoms.
Second, why assume individual stems as the way mosses experience the world? Isn't this a human simplification and bias towards individualizing a complex system? Isn't a more indigenous description one that acknowledges the holistic living being which interacts with the soil, fungi, insects, etc.?
As seen in these passages—and throughout this book—Kimmerer anthropomorphizes mosses, which is fine for poetic purposes and even for attempts to gain new perspective and ideas, but is presumptive as a standalone knowledge claim. Literally listening to moss is impossible; symbolically listening to them is just a redescription of the scientific method. Science is not just a cold, detached metricization of the world. It is a creative domain that requires novel techniques.
To this point, there is a place for storytelling and taking on new perspectives. But in Kimmerer's telling, the scientific is anathema to storytelling and alternative framings. This is a false dichotomy and shallow understanding of the history of science. Scientific models and paradigms are made up of stories about the world—a gathering of the current body of knowledge in to a coherent system and research program. As new data complicate old narratives, new narratives are created to tie things together (See Kuhn's .
Like so many reactionary critics of a method or knowledge base, she focuses on a narrow, misrepresented, negative aspect rather than considering the merits of the enterprise as a whole.
She makes the same mistake when critically reviewing her time consulting for a wealthy landowner. She decries the landowner for moving mosses from their natural environment to a less hospitable garden, but goes way too far when comparing the process to chattel slavery:
One could maybe see how disrupting an ecosystem is emblematic of humanity's passe attitude towards climate change but Kimmerer doesn't make any of these connections to make her point. She is just describing the simple act itself—which sounds like very common gardening practices. She goes on further to wax critical about how ownership of land ruins our relationship to it:
Once again, she focuses on a negative example to make a generalized condemnation. But of course plenty of farmers and wildlife conservation institutions and governments own land which they foster or leave completely alone. And many theorists view ownership as highly purposeful and useful to civilization. Kimmerer doesn't consider other views—except in caricature. I can understand the sentiment around her words—the owner views nature in a way that conflicts with her own views—but sentiments alone are not a good basis for making such widespread judgment. And if transplanting mosses "diminishes innate sovereignty" like slavery does, one wonders how Kimmerer justifies any of her possessions. Her home full of cozy furniture, lights, and books is made from the dead carcasses of logs and the gashes of mines ("Straw Into Gold, ¶2). Her condemnation is not holistic, fair, or consistent.
Indeed, she isn't at all critical of experiments polluting the environment or literally killing mosses. A colleague uses unretrieved plastic beads in the wild for an experiment: "Within two days, every [plastic] bead on the bare tailings was gone, blown away and buried in the shifting sand." ("Binding Up the Wounds", ¶17). No criticism. Kimmerer herself acts as "a logger in miniature" as she "one by one, [she] pluck[s] out single shoots of Tetraphis, stem by stem, until the density was reduced by half" ("Choices", ¶31). No criticism. If merely moving mosses is the slave trade, what is decapitation of moss shoots?
Her fast and loose use of larger concepts and values is reflected in the same treatment of words, which she sometimes views as arbitrary:
The tenor of Kimmerer's point is good: the public shouldn't be scared off from science. The way she makes the claims is shallow and misleading: latin names are arbitrary. At a certain level, all names and words are arbitrary. But certain domains of knowledge conventionally use certain terms so that we can make sure we are talking about the right thing. Many vocabularies even have extra embedded knowledge, like how the latin names of organisms contain both Genus and species, which tells us about both the specific organism and which larger group it comes from (and implies many things about the whole hierarchy if you know enough about taxonomy). If you lose information and communicability by forgoing a term or vocabulary, the decision is not merely arbitrary, it's a tradeoff.
Kimmerer gestures toward my point elsewhere when describing how her students benefit from learning moss terminology:
I love this description of the power of language to affect perception. I know that Kimmerer is effectively relaying this info to her students because earlier in the book, Kimmerer uses scientific names to help the reader see moss more clearly and differentiate it from other plants:
This passage shows Gathering Moss at its best: bridging the vocabulary of science with the vocabulary of the everyday. The problem is the consistency of this approach. Later on, instead of using evolutionary and ecological dynamics to fully explain a plant's appearance, she reverts to archaic animism and childish pattern-matching: As this reviewer notes:
Such dubious reasoning leads to dubious conclusions. This specific instance has Kimmerer talking about blue vervain's use as a liver tonic ("Web of Reciprocity", ¶11), for which I was able to find zero clinical evidence, only herbalist sites recommending it for a large variety of unrelated ailments. Millions of dollars and decades of research spent on such "alternative" medicines have only recommended extreme caution: alternative medicines have only shown neutral or negative affects, while distracting patients from evidence-based medicine that could actually make a difference (Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat, Ch. 13).
So what comes across first as nice sounding ideas quickly becomes practically useless or even harmful. I was personally disappointed in Kimmerer's expert advice as I've been considering how to handle large mats of moss on my shed. Kimmerer provides an incomplete answer:
I found more relevant information on this MetaFilter forum than in this expert's book on mosses. Sure there doesn't seem to be a definitive, scientifically studied answer, but there are many other reasons for and against mosses on roofs which Kimmerer doesn't address.
These passages can breeze by when you are reading. Kimmerer's writing style is indeed poetic and engaging. But the poetry and happy coincidences are not mere literary devices. She takes them overly seriously—advocating for unhelpful and harmful ways of viewing the world and building knowledge—which is unfortunate because mosses are understudied and she does present many interesting ideas and perspectives. Mosses needed an advocate. Kimmerer couldn't deliver.
Kimmerer writes poetically about mosses and their ecology. She connects them back to indigenous practices and tries to approach the plant from fresh perspectives in order to understand them better. She presents many facts about mosses and shares her process for making new discoveries about them.
All of this is interesting and useful on its face. But Kimmerer takes her own poetry and indigenous knowledge as gospel. The quotes below show how she makes hyperbolic claims and contradicts herself: maligning science even as her work fits within it; praising indigenous knowledge even as it offers unfalsifiable claims as the truth; seriously comparing moss transplanting to the slave trade; lambasting ownership as destruction of nature while remaining uncritical of her own practices; calling scientific names arbitrary even as she happily imparts them to her students; urging scientific study of mosses before making conclusions even as she uses anecdotal evidence to argue a conclusion.
By far the biggest problem with the book is Kimmerer's contradictory, confused, and shallow criticism of science:
The scientific method I was taught in school is like asking a direct question, disrespectfully demanding knowledge rather than waiting for it to be revealed. From Tetraphis, I began to understand how to learn differently, to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them. ("Choices", ¶23)
This is a gross oversimplification. Much of the scientific method is centered around watching experiments play out, sometimes over generations, in order to review what happened. In the next paragraph, she doubles down on this biased and unhelpful view of science:
I had understood Tetraphis colonies from the human perspective, as clumps in various stages of reproduction. And I had learned little by doing so. Rather than looking at the clump as an entity, I had to recognize that the clump was simply an arbitrary unit that was convenient for me, but had little meaning for the moss. Mosses experience the world as individual stems and to understand their lives I needed to make my observations at the same scale.
First off, the course of scientific discovery has relied heavily on this exact process of decomposing wholes into parts and observing phenomena at different scales. Much of it has been unintuitive, but all of it has simply extended the human perspective—not supplanted it with the "stories" or "experiences" of organs, cells, molecules, and atoms.
Second, why assume individual stems as the way mosses experience the world? Isn't this a human simplification and bias towards individualizing a complex system? Isn't a more indigenous description one that acknowledges the holistic living being which interacts with the soil, fungi, insects, etc.?
As seen in these passages—and throughout this book—Kimmerer anthropomorphizes mosses, which is fine for poetic purposes and even for attempts to gain new perspective and ideas, but is presumptive as a standalone knowledge claim. Literally listening to moss is impossible; symbolically listening to them is just a redescription of the scientific method. Science is not just a cold, detached metricization of the world. It is a creative domain that requires novel techniques.
To this point, there is a place for storytelling and taking on new perspectives. But in Kimmerer's telling, the scientific is anathema to storytelling and alternative framings. This is a false dichotomy and shallow understanding of the history of science. Scientific models and paradigms are made up of stories about the world—a gathering of the current body of knowledge in to a coherent system and research program. As new data complicate old narratives, new narratives are created to tie things together (See Kuhn's .
Like so many reactionary critics of a method or knowledge base, she focuses on a narrow, misrepresented, negative aspect rather than considering the merits of the enterprise as a whole.
She makes the same mistake when critically reviewing her time consulting for a wealthy landowner. She decries the landowner for moving mosses from their natural environment to a less hospitable garden, but goes way too far when comparing the process to chattel slavery:
My task was to make diagnoses and write the prescriptions [for the ailing mosses]. Which could safely be moved to the house and which should be abandoned? I thought of the doctors consigned to meet the slave ships at the shore. They would inspect the human cargo to pick out the healthiest for sale, the ones most likely to survive in their transplanted environment. ("The Owner", ¶41)
One could maybe see how disrupting an ecosystem is emblematic of humanity's passe attitude towards climate change but Kimmerer doesn't make any of these connections to make her point. She is just describing the simple act itself—which sounds like very common gardening practices. She goes on further to wax critical about how ownership of land ruins our relationship to it:
Ownership seems a uniquely human behavior, a social contract validating the desire for purposeless possession and control. ("The Owner", ¶43)
Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed. ("The Owner", ¶45)
Once again, she focuses on a negative example to make a generalized condemnation. But of course plenty of farmers and wildlife conservation institutions and governments own land which they foster or leave completely alone. And many theorists view ownership as highly purposeful and useful to civilization. Kimmerer doesn't consider other views—except in caricature. I can understand the sentiment around her words—the owner views nature in a way that conflicts with her own views—but sentiments alone are not a good basis for making such widespread judgment. And if transplanting mosses "diminishes innate sovereignty" like slavery does, one wonders how Kimmerer justifies any of her possessions. Her home full of cozy furniture, lights, and books is made from the dead carcasses of logs and the gashes of mines ("Straw Into Gold, ¶2). Her condemnation is not holistic, fair, or consistent.
Indeed, she isn't at all critical of experiments polluting the environment or literally killing mosses. A colleague uses unretrieved plastic beads in the wild for an experiment: "Within two days, every [plastic] bead on the bare tailings was gone, blown away and buried in the shifting sand." ("Binding Up the Wounds", ¶17). No criticism. Kimmerer herself acts as "a logger in miniature" as she "one by one, [she] pluck[s] out single shoots of Tetraphis, stem by stem, until the density was reduced by half" ("Choices", ¶31). No criticism. If merely moving mosses is the slave trade, what is decapitation of moss shoots?
Her fast and loose use of larger concepts and values is reflected in the same treatment of words, which she sometimes views as arbitrary:
Knowing mosses . . . does not require knowing their scientific names. The Latin words we give them are only arbitrary constructs. ("Learning to See", ¶18)
The tenor of Kimmerer's point is good: the public shouldn't be scared off from science. The way she makes the claims is shallow and misleading: latin names are arbitrary. At a certain level, all names and words are arbitrary. But certain domains of knowledge conventionally use certain terms so that we can make sure we are talking about the right thing. Many vocabularies even have extra embedded knowledge, like how the latin names of organisms contain both Genus and species, which tells us about both the specific organism and which larger group it comes from (and implies many things about the whole hierarchy if you know enough about taxonomy). If you lose information and communicability by forgoing a term or vocabulary, the decision is not merely arbitrary, it's a tradeoff.
Kimmerer gestures toward my point elsewhere when describing how her students benefit from learning moss terminology:
On the trail and in the lab, I like to listen to my students talk. Day by day, their vocabulary stretches and they proudly refer to leafy green shoots as “gametophytes” and the little brown thingamajigs on top of the moss are dutifully referred to as “sporophytes.” The upright, tufted mosses become “acrocarps,” the horizontal fronds are “pleurocarps.” Having words for these forms makes the differences between them so much more obvious. With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see. ("Learning to See", ¶14)
I love this description of the power of language to affect perception. I know that Kimmerer is effectively relaying this info to her students because earlier in the book, Kimmerer uses scientific names to help the reader see moss more clearly and differentiate it from other plants:
The word “moss” is commonly applied to plants which are not actually mosses. Reindeer “moss” is a lichen, Spanish “moss” is a flowering plant, sea “moss” is an alga, and club “moss” is a lycophyte. So what is a moss? A true moss or bryophyte is the most primitive of land plants. Mosses are often described by what they lack, in comparison to the more familiar higher plants. They lack flowers, fruits, and seeds and have no roots. They have no vascular system, no xylem and phloem to conduct water internally. They are the most simple of plants, and in their simplicity, elegant. With just a few rudimentary components of stem and leaf, evolution has produced some 22,000 species of moss worldwide ( "Learning to See", ¶19)
This passage shows Gathering Moss at its best: bridging the vocabulary of science with the vocabulary of the everyday. The problem is the consistency of this approach. Later on, instead of using evolutionary and ecological dynamics to fully explain a plant's appearance, she reverts to archaic animism and childish pattern-matching: As this reviewer notes:
[M]y skeptic hackles rose when, in her essay on indigenous uses of mosses, she blithely claims, "It's well known that a medicinal plant frequently occurs in the vicinity of the source of the illness," which sounds about as dubious as the medieval conviction that foods that looked like particular organs were beneficial for that organ.
Such dubious reasoning leads to dubious conclusions. This specific instance has Kimmerer talking about blue vervain's use as a liver tonic ("Web of Reciprocity", ¶11), for which I was able to find zero clinical evidence, only herbalist sites recommending it for a large variety of unrelated ailments. Millions of dollars and decades of research spent on such "alternative" medicines have only recommended extreme caution: alternative medicines have only shown neutral or negative affects, while distracting patients from evidence-based medicine that could actually make a difference (Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat, Ch. 13).
So what comes across first as nice sounding ideas quickly becomes practically useless or even harmful. I was personally disappointed in Kimmerer's expert advice as I've been considering how to handle large mats of moss on my shed. Kimmerer provides an incomplete answer:
Roofing professionals have led homeowners to believe that mosses lead to degradation of the shingles and eventually to leaks. . . However, there is no scientific evidence to support or refute this claim. . . One technical representative for a shingle company acknowledges that he's never seen any damage by mosses. Why not just let them be?
I found more relevant information on this MetaFilter forum than in this expert's book on mosses. Sure there doesn't seem to be a definitive, scientifically studied answer, but there are many other reasons for and against mosses on roofs which Kimmerer doesn't address.
These passages can breeze by when you are reading. Kimmerer's writing style is indeed poetic and engaging. But the poetry and happy coincidences are not mere literary devices. She takes them overly seriously—advocating for unhelpful and harmful ways of viewing the world and building knowledge—which is unfortunate because mosses are understudied and she does present many interesting ideas and perspectives. Mosses needed an advocate. Kimmerer couldn't deliver.
January 7, 2025
This is a completely lovely book. It encourages the reader to look outside at very small things, to consider how small unnoticed things are important parts of world ecosystems, and even to look inside and consider yourself.
Each chapter takes a meaningful personal recollection and expands it into a particular moss. sphagnum of peat bogs (now I understand how those peat people were preserved!), or bryum in the crevices of city concrete (it's everywhere!), tetraplodon at the base if trees where animals urinate (it likes nitrogen!).
The author, a bryologist, fully inhabits her northern American Indian heritage - I think Onondaga (nope, she's Potawatomi). This might seem to get in the way of moss biology, but eventually her Indian memories are passionate and indelible, and they partner with moss. We are part of a circle of life.
The moss part is wonderful. But don't come for lots of exacting biological specifics -- this is more a series of moss stories. Come for the stories of how moss grows, in its smallness, in its ability to fit into a niche, what nutrients it takes, what it gives back to trees, and the tiny species that live in it (yes, tardigrades!)
Owning up, I got myself a 10x hand lens and I can be found, newly, peering into moss patches. (All looks like bryum still....) If only the accomplished and so wonderful author would take me with her into the forest.
Each chapter takes a meaningful personal recollection and expands it into a particular moss. sphagnum of peat bogs (now I understand how those peat people were preserved!), or bryum in the crevices of city concrete (it's everywhere!), tetraplodon at the base if trees where animals urinate (it likes nitrogen!).
The author, a bryologist, fully inhabits her northern American Indian heritage - I think Onondaga (nope, she's Potawatomi). This might seem to get in the way of moss biology, but eventually her Indian memories are passionate and indelible, and they partner with moss. We are part of a circle of life.
The moss part is wonderful. But don't come for lots of exacting biological specifics -- this is more a series of moss stories. Come for the stories of how moss grows, in its smallness, in its ability to fit into a niche, what nutrients it takes, what it gives back to trees, and the tiny species that live in it (yes, tardigrades!)
Owning up, I got myself a 10x hand lens and I can be found, newly, peering into moss patches. (All looks like bryum still....) If only the accomplished and so wonderful author would take me with her into the forest.
Read
April 25, 2019I could listen to Kimmerer perform the phone book. Her audiobook voice is just lovely, and it really adds dimension to what she writes about. This is a book about moss, as explored through the scientific and Indigenous knowledge of nature. It definitely made me take pause while wandering the woods recently, and it's a lovely ode to a part of nature that we all so easily overlook.
June 26, 2019
DNF'd 5%. This wasn't what I wanted it to be.
April 4, 2023
I never cared much about moss until I started reading this book. The author's passion and love for nature, and moss, are so vivid and it reflects mine. Moments like these remind me why I wanted to study biology (but also much more). Two weeks ago I went on a walk through the woods, and I paid close attention to everything, especially moss. I even took some photos of a really cute moss I saw. This book feels like you are on a nature walk with the author, and they're telling you all these cool facts about moss life and reproduction, but you also catch a glimpse into the author's life. Reading this restored my inner peace. I wish I could have a physical copy to annotate.
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April 17, 2023
Such a beautiful combination of memoir and science, and natural and cultural histories.
Kimmerer is amazing at showing how the smallest of things (mosses, in the case) are interconnected with the rest of the ecological system...and humans. And how humans have disrupted the system so much, how out of balance so many of us are with nature.
It's so wild that this book is twenty years old, and rings so true today.
Kimmerer is amazing at showing how the smallest of things (mosses, in the case) are interconnected with the rest of the ecological system...and humans. And how humans have disrupted the system so much, how out of balance so many of us are with nature.
It's so wild that this book is twenty years old, and rings so true today.
June 21, 2011
There's a style of writing on potentially dry subjects that includes a lot of "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek"-like personal narrative and autobiography. It's a great style, but it's so heavily overused in this book that I could't read it.
May 23, 2022
4.5 ⭐️ This was incredibly well written and is a great foundational read on the significance of mosses in both science and culture.
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