Now and Zen...?

My Japanese weeping maple...

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One of my Azaleas...
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My flowering Japanese cherry...
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My Stewartia pseudocamellia...
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My witch-hazel, Hamamelis x intermedia...
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Another of my witch-hazels...
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And another of my Azaleas...
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I have strange feeling that my garden is trying to tell me something. Maybe I should just let go and watch as it evolves into a full-blown moss garden?
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More complete, by adding

A garden is not complete

until nothing more can be removed.

*- Japanese proverb -

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On the way to the school bus this morning, my girls found this stone by the sidewalk. "Look, mom, it's a perfect miniature mountain! Let's take it home!" So I carried it home with red, frostbitten fingers (no gloves again, one gets so lazy when they are seldom needed). Under some big trees behind the house, it now forms an enchanted little landscape together with the ever-flourishing mosses, like a tiny shard of completeness amongst all imperfection.

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I just wonder how I can keep the maintenance guys from removing it, without marking it with some kind of an ugly label?

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Rain and the zen of moss gardening

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The weather gods of the Pacific Northwest are showing off all their muscles. Since last Friday, they have bestowed Seattle with almost six inches of rain and there still seems to be no end to their generosity. Some coastal areas have got drenched with 12 inches in three days, which equals half the yearly rainfall of Stockholm or Melbourne pouring down during just one long weekend. Our air humidity is now close to 90%, but unfortunately that's where all similarities stop with the velvety, balm climes of Singapore...

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Not tempted to stick my nose out and get soaked, I've been perusing George Schenk's remarkable book Moss Gardening Including Lichens, Liverworts, and Other Miniatures (Timber Press, 1997). It is a perfect companion for rainy winter months, the high season of all mosses; when else do their emerald, smooth cushions look so soft and becoming than during the coldest and wettest days of the year?

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Originating from the moist shores of the Pacific Northwest, George draws from his long experience of moss gardening on three continents and offers fascinating insights to how his tiny subjects have been used in the gardens of East and West. With his expressive pen, he blends garden history and design with horticultural practices into a delightful mixture of knowledge, wit and entertainment. Many pictures in his book are highly inspiring, and George can now be blamed for getting me all fired up about growing mosses in containers, especially on flat bonsai trays. Just imagine low, unglazed trays holding miniature landscapes of soft, billowy mosses: so poetic, unusual, easy to care for and hardy - in my eyes, absolutely irresistible!

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On the pages of Moss gardening, I especially enjoy George's thoughts of what he calls 'ocular gardening', or gardening by eyes only, where the gardener draws back all her efforts instead of bending the nature to her ideas. This minimalist gardening practice is unique to moss gardeners and consists of waiting for nature to plant mosses best suited for the place, providing only a minimum of help by watering occasionally and by picking up wind-blown debris. According to George, in a couple of years, the patient gardener is rewarded with a luxuriant carpet of mosses. Not the most patient gardener myself, I'm intrigued by this zen-like idea of letting go and enjoying the slowly emerging results, even if I know from experience that the reality is seldom as easy as that, not even in a moss-prone area like the Pacific Northwest.

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A carpet of moss is a great awakener of the sensuous human being that I think every gardener must by nature be, writes George in his wonderful, spirited book. I cannot but agree, and leave you with his favorite haiku by Ikiru from Japan, the country of the masters of moss gardening:

On the shingled gate

Where in rain moss grows jade-bright
Earth and heaven merge.

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Spellbound by magical mosses

The road to the Hoh Rainforest winds through the wet, moss-coated forests, giving a inkling of the wilder things to come...

A never-ending sound of water: dropping, drizzling and splashing everywhere. And a smell of drenched, soaked earth, combined with the aromatic fragrance of water-dripping conifers. The Olympic National Park in western Washington state might seem like an odd holiday destination for winter weary Seattleites being a place four times wetter than our drizzly hometown, but it is nevertheless the place where we spend our spring break, hiking the forests and beachcombing the shores of the Pacific ocean.

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Waterfalls run through the soaked slopes of the mountains.
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On these western slopes of the Olympic mountains, the storms from the ocean drop off their wet cargo drenching the area with up to 170 inches (almost 4 meters) of rain per year and creating perfect growing conditions for fertile temperate rainforests. Once, they covered the land between Oregon and southern Alaska, but today, only the lush valleys of Hoh, Queets, Quinault and Bocachiel protected within the National Park remain as a testament for how the landscape looked like before logging took over. In the tiny town of Forks near the Hoh Rainforest, there was no escaping from commercial buzz created by the "Twilight" vampire sagas, but for once this felt like a stroke of luck, as the place (the village, not the surrounding nature...) seemed to need all the help it can get to be any kind of a magnet for visitors.

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Mossy trees and ferny banks by the shallow, stony Quinault river.

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Walking through the Hoh and Quinault Rainforests, the landscape felt spellbound and almost unreal in its magnificent, great wildness. Everything was dripping, drenched, saturated with water, and all things growing seemed to be involved in a slow but ceaseless competition for light and space. The ground was filled with older generations of giant trees, now gently nursing the younger ones with nutrients from their gradually decaying huge trunks. An earthy, rich smell of decomposing wood lingered in the air, competing with the fragrant scent of the conifers. With their canopies almost 300 feet above, the great, straight stems of Western redcedars, hemlocks and Sitka spruces formed a cathedral with only two colours, emerald and rust, in its stained-glass windows.

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Beard mosses hanging form the old sugar maples.

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A thick coat of mosses and lichens clung to every surface. These usually humble background players seemed almost have taken over the scene, celebrating their triumph by forming intricate tapestries in olive and coppery tones, hanging like wet rags from the branches and covering everything on the ground with billowy mounds. Burrowed in these moist cushions, small seeds had germinated and peeked up their heads, ready to begin their long journey upwards guided by the thin threads of light peeking through the greenery from the distant sky.

The bright leaves of common wood sorrel carpeted the ground together with mosses everywhere.

Even the river bottom was covered with bright green mosses, swaying gently in the cold, glazier-fed water. Careless of our excited glances, a flock of deer grazed on the adjacent meadow, only interested in the fresh new shoots that poke up from the waterlogged soil.

Tiny spruce saplings sprouting from the fallen trees.

In the evenings, we huddled around the fireplace in our room at the lodge. Listening to the pounding waves outside the windows, we thought of another favorite hiking place of ours on the other side of the same ocean: the Otway National Park with its temperate rainforests of tree ferns, gumtrees and tiny frogs in southeastern Australia. So different, and still so similar. Contented with our visit to these stormy, mossy shores, we couldn't help sending our longing regards with the waves to the gentle, southern sister of these wild northern forests.

Mossages - a modern take on moss

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Just to continue the moss theme I posted about for a couple a days ago...

Anna Granborne created project Sporeborne that was featured in Creative Review, Oct 2008. According to her web site, writing with moss seemingly represents an unusual synthesis between advanced civilisation and nature. She writes, that it gives a chance for us to speak as individuals and artists, but also to be the spokesperson of organisms which have no voice in our world. She hopes that not only the words will be noticed, but also the moss itself, put to the forefront through it's sculpting, fashioned into a form we can understand.

K

There is no looking back now; mosses are at last in the limelight, humble and small as they might be.

K

K

Thanks and all pictures with © :

ABE/Anna Garforth

http://www.crosshatchling.co.uk/
annagarforth@gmail.com
+44 (0)7910 558 394.

K

A closer look at mosses

A typical Finnish coastal forest with grey granite cliffs, mosses, heathers and pine trees. Photo by Karl-Dietrich Bühler, in "The Scandinavian Garden" (2000).
KK

I probably am genetically predestined to love mosses. When I was small, I loved to sit on the grey granite cliffs and moss-covered rocks of the coastal South-West Finland; looking at the ants in work, climbing over the different mosses like in a miniature forest. In the autumn, cranberries gloved with their bright red globes like small lanterns on the mosses. I still can feel the smell of sun-warmed moss on the grey granite cliffs, combined with the luxurious smell of small, orange or brown chanterelles, peeking up between the mosses. And in my garden in Saltsjöbaden, I could not see any reason for taking my neighbour's advice of replacing my emerald green moss carpet with a new roll-on lawn turf despite repeated "hints" from him.

K

Rock cap moss (Dicranum) growing on an old fence in Clyde Hill, near Seattle.

KKMMoss-covered azalea branches at the Azalea Walk at the Washington Arboretum.

K

For years, most gardening advice concerning mosses has been about getting rid of them. But recently, this beautiful and hardy plant that has been around for at least 450 million years, has become more popular as an alternative to the traditional lawn. Maybe the great interest in Japanese gardens, where mosses have traditionally had a prominent place, has influenced us aesthetically.

K

Moss path at the Seattle Japanese Garden at Washington Arboretum.

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The Japanese Garden at Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.

K

As a fact, mosses are a lovely and sustainable alternative to lawns in shady or half-sunny areas with slightly acidic and compacted soils - so they are the complete opposite to other garden plants. Moss plants do not possess true roots (and how could they, used as they are to growing on cliffs and stones...). Instead they derive their nutrients and moisture from the air, and therefore they don't need any fertilizers. They are drought resistant (even here, they are used to drying out totally on cliffs and stones), and a small splash of water can restore them to health within minutes. Although mosses require moisture, a moss lawn needs only a small fraction the thousands of liters (or gallons) of tap water (beyond rainwater) that a suburban grass lawn needs annually. Mosses grow fast and hug the ground, so they prevent soil erosion. Deer don't tend to eat them, but birds sometimes peck insects from moss and can therefore damage the looks of a moss carpet.

KA moss-covered Ganesh in my neighbourhood greets me every time I walk past it... it really seems to have a personality of it's own.

Tove Jansson, one of Finland's most successful writers (whose books about Moomin have been translated into twelve languages), wrote about mosses: 'Only farmers and summer visitors walk on the moss. They do not know and it cannot be said often enough that moss is the most sensitive plant there is. You step at it once and the moss recovers in the rain, but the second time it does not. The third time you walk over the moss it is dead.' My experience tells me otherwise; mosses are actually quite tolerant of walking and they do recover quite fast. But I totally agree with Tove in admiring these velvety, humble plants.

K