Nature is not obvious; she guards her treasure
This is a wet land: welcome to the moss. Plus Postcard #2 for paid subscribers.
Greetings from the moss,
In the detail of beauty, I beguile you with smallness. Yet you may wonder what this wet land looks like. Perhaps I photograph the minutiae as the whole is elusive, but occasionally it reveals itself.
Wet land. This is a wet land. This is a wetland.
A day after World Wetlands Day I begin to write, to let my thoughts settle on the page. Some wetlands are obvious, others less so. Would you recognise this one?
Pasture, until the ditched burn becomes visible behind encroaching common reed.
Heath, to the eye, until you spy the fleeing roe deer, and the water ejected by their progress.
Woodland, until the ground submits softly, wetly, beneath your feet.
Nature is not always obvious; she guards her treasures. Patience and persistence are needed, returning, biding time. Still we only glimpse the lives beyond our ken1. In between my pursuit with macro lens of her small beauty, I have gradually accumulated phone snaps of their setting, some of which I have included here.
In the wet cold air of winter, as I look across the moss, it seems to rust: faded flowers on ling, sphagnum moss, grasses.
In my memory I reappraise the scene; in the early hours of the next morning it is an inland sea, a lake, in which I drift. From the fog of sleep out under the still bright stars. A quiet swell of snow-darkened ling punctuated by masts of pine in shallow bays and safe harbours; the occasional island. The push and pull of a tide, in service to the brightening moon. A place to navigate by deer.
In the past eighteen months, this has become a wetter land. The moss is happy. You may ask, what exactly is a moss? Here I shall borrow from By No Means Empty:
The terrain is the result of fluvio-glacial deposits; to the eye the contours remain fluid, rolling around a lowland raised bog—the moss. The word mos(s) is old Scots language and can be part of a place name as well as referring to a marsh, bog, or tract of soft wet ground.
Large parts of this moss have been dug to fuel fires since the village was founded ‘on barren moor’ in 1825. It has taken me until now to realise just how much, as ling heather does a good job of concealing the surface. These areas, revegetated, are the wettest, and perhaps even the best bog habitat. While the ground has been frozen, I have ventured a little further, and even discovered where the cutters stopped for lunch at the limit of their peat bank.
Below a larger pine, something that doesn’t belong. A piece of glass, partially covered with bark. A rusty ring: an old saucepan, inverted, a hole in its base through which heather has grown. Nearby, a lemonade bottle. A pan handle. A second, green, pan missing its handle. Here is a place where refreshment was taken.
Much of the moss is visually ‘heath’, with bog species more common in old ‘grips’ and channels. There is extensive regeneration of Scots pine and birch. Not all are vigorous and healthy, and there is an absence of generations between the smallest seedlings and their parents. Those deer again. My vocabulary has widened to add asphodel to blaeberry, crowberry to ling, cross-leaved heath to hare’s tail and common cottongrass. There is a lexicon of lichen and syntax of sphagnum to learn; in this I am a beginner.
If you’d like to read more about why bogs matter in an era of climate change, and glimpse more of their seasonal colour, you may like to read
Indeed I am slowly building a collection of writing around this moss.
This week’s treasure
I found my flute shortly after posting last week's letter.
I allow the wind to blow away my lingering desire for sleep, quicken my pace, set blood pumping. Let body lead, mind trail fluttering in its wake. I stop to listen to green-winged teal pipe and flute and squabble on the pond beyond the rhododendron.
This week’s letter is in two parts. My ‘usual’ above, to share with you all, and a second part, or postcard, for paid subscribers. Including the latter restricts comments (ugh) however if you happen to be reading this in the Substack app, there’s an option to ‘restack with a note’ as a workaround.
Thank you to all of you who visit the moss with me each week. I am grateful for the gift of your attention, and your kind words in response to my letters.
Postcards from the moss #2
Postcards are prose and poem, and original artwork, for paid subscribers, to say thank you for recognising the value in my writing.