A Love Affair with Mosses

For most people, falling in love with another human being seems to follow a fairly predictable course. You tend to fall hard. You tend to fall fast. And no one really gets up in the morning thinking, today is the day I will fall in love. So, there’s usually the delightful bonus of surprise.

Falling in love with a plant is really no different.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

In summer 2023 I was awarded an artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park. Like most visitors, I was looking forward to basking in the park’s wide-open seascapes or in the 360-degree views from the tops of dramatic balds. But that’s before I set eyes on the park’s tremendous diversity of mosses, tiny plants that threaded the cracks of boulders like basting stitches or softened whole forest floors in plush, lumpy carpets of emerald green. One look at the mosses, and I passed up the big, showy views to spend most of my time with my butt in the air and nose to the ground in far humbler company. To my great fortune, fellow artist-in-residence Mallory Zondag was as smitten with these diminutive plants as I was. Check out the fall 2023 issue of Zygote Quarterly to read my discoveries about the amazing natural history of mosses and to see a photo essay of Mallory’s moss-inspired fiber art.