"This garden is very interesting in that it’s part of a spiritual practice: It’s used for meditation. Moss is very tiny..."

"... and being in the garden, looking so closely to distinguish one type from another, requires a special kind of attention. It opens up a completely different kind of universe."

Said Harvard architecture professor Toshiko Mori, about the Saihoji Kokedera Temple and Moss Garden in Kyoto, quoted in "The 25 Gardens You Must SeeWe asked six horticultural experts to debate and ultimately choose the places that’ve changed the way we look at — and think about — plants" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see all the photos and read about the other gardens).

I love the story of the creation of this garden: "In 1339, Muso Kokushi, a Buddhist high priest and master gardener, created what’s believed to be the first-ever karesansui (dry landscape)... carefully placed rocks and swaths of sand or gravel raked to invoke rippling water... In the nineteenth century, Saihoji was flooded repeatedly when a nearby river overflowed its banks... Rather than fight nature, the monks embraced change... With more than 120 varieties [of moss]... Saihoji looks quite different than it did in Kokushi’s day, but, in the hands of the monks who continue to maintain it, its purpose of encouraging serenity and contemplation hasn’t changed....."

The monks carry on a traditional practice of meditation, bound to this site for 7 centuries. But what would it be for you to drop in one day?

In late November, the moss effulges.

Observed and photographed by Meade.

"But who knew (other than paleontologists) that there was a time in Earth’s history when it rained for a million years?"

"Or about the forty million years when moss dominated the planet? Or about how plankton, by inventing photosynthesis and thereby giving off oxygen in the course of some two billion years, transformed Earth’s yellow methane-filled atmosphere into blue skies, and the lifeless landscape into forests of green? In William Steig’s book 'Rotten Island,' illustrations show erupting volcanoes and creepy sea creatures and thorny plants and vicious land animals. One day, a jealous battle starts over a new life-form: a flower. Violence, destruction, giant insects, and ice and fire ensue, and lead to a mass extinction. I used to think that 'Rotten Island' was about the disastrous pettiness of human wants and behaviors, and about how much better life might be without us. Now I see it as a reasonably accurate visual history of our planet, with extra polka dots and stripes, in watercolor...."

From "Reinventing the Dinosaur 'Life on Our Planet,' a new Netflix nature documentary, renews our fascination with our most feared and loved precursors" (The New Yorker).

We watched the first episode of this series last night. I wasn't going to continue, but now that I know that moss and plankton will get their due — that it won't be all lumbering CGI dinosaurs and Morgan Freeman speaking ponderously about who's fighting and winning dominion over Earth — I might give another episode a chance.

At the Mossy Rock Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

"I don’t want to be a girlboss. I don’t want to hustle. I simply want to live my life slowly and lay down in a bed of moss with my lover and..."

"... enjoy the rest of my existence reading books, creating art and loving myself and the people in my life."

Said some woman on TikTok, quoted by Jessica Bennett in "The Worst Midnight Email From the Boss, Ever" (NYT). 

Bennett — who hates that Elon Musk email telling workers to be "hard core" — concurs:

Honestly, yes. “Hard core” is a bygone era of management... [W]e’ve now got plenty of other, soft-core interests to replace it. How about a workplace modeled on cottagecore, in which we just flutter around in forests and forage for mushrooms instead of hovering over Slack? Or cabincore, in which we huddle in cozy flannel (comfycore) in front of a fireplace instead of being warmed by the glow of our screens?...

Maybe what we are witnessing with Twitter’s mass exodus — and the general antiwork sentiment in general — is a labor revolt “in real time,” as one Twitter user put it....

I'm so glad I have a "moss" tag to use for this... especially since, as I was in the middle of writing this post, Meade came in and announced that the moss he'd planted for me last summer was taking hold. And he saw a mouse on the moss — a moss mouse. How cottagecore is that?!

At the Mossy Ridge Café...

... stretch out on the velvety green carpet and chat all night.

At the Hitting-the-Wall Café...

... what were you doing 500 million years ago?

Fog-walked out of Meadhouse.

Up to Blue Mounds, that monadnock...



We had our trekking poles and our Kahtoola MICROspikes Traction Systems, so we made it through 7 miles of rocky terrain before the absurdly early nightfall that plagues Wisconsin around the time of the winter solstice.

We went out precisely because it was foggy. I wanted to see the woods in the fog. There's nothing prettier, if you adjust your aesthetic and keep an eye out for pops of color and design:

"A new bathmat made of moss is kept alive by the water that drips from your body as you dry."

Nice... or somehow unsanitary?

I created a vortex on Melrose Avenue.

ADDED:



(Big thanks to commenter Chip Ahoy!)

If you wonder what this place is, well, you can see from the sign that it's on Melrose Avenue, so go find it.

Here's what we said at the time:

This looks like what they do on "Trading Spaces" and the people come back and hate it.

The hay-on-the-wall episode!

Yeah.

There was also the moss-on-the-wall episode. This is the twigs all over the outside of your building episode.

"A lost world of rare plants, giant flowers and bizarre animals."

Found in Indonesia:

Flown by helicopter to a mountain preserve virtually untouched by humans, the scientists found more than 40 species new to science. They also spotted the legendary six-wired bird of paradise, a species with distinctive wiry head plumes that was first described in 1897 but that has proved elusive ever since.

Team leaders on Tuesday described how they spent two weeks in December, butterfly nets and binoculars at the ready, traversing the foggy slopes of the Foja Mountains in Papua province. Among trees encrusted with moss and draped with huge ferns, they marveled as birds and animals approached with no fear.

"It has a fairyland quality," said Bruce Beehler, an ornithologist with Conservation International in Washington and the expedition's co-leader. "It's a spectacularly beautiful Garden of Eden."

Beautiful!

AND: Be sure to click on the slideshow at the link.

Project Runway.

We see Daniel given the choice to keep his model or switch to Tarah, whom Zulema stole from Nick last week, setting in motion the bad karma that took her down and put Tarah up for grabs. But Daniel sticks with his original model, and the charming Tarah must go.

The new task is to make something out of things bought from flower stores. It seems inspired by the wonderful first episode of Season 1, when Austin made a dress of corn husks, and no one else got seriously into the vegetable matter on hand in the grocery store where they had to do their shopping.

Tim Gunn tells them that the winner on this project will have immunity. We see Santino saying he really wants to win this one so he can do something "really offensive" on the next one and get away with it. Nice attitude. That's what immunity's for, isn't it?

Kara cares about helping Chloe, who's way behind. She's got this the theory that one woman must make it to the final three. Kara says she's amazed that she's made it this far, and she's generous about acknowledging that Chloe was the best of the women. Chloe doesn't have much of a design though. It's just an ordinary dress with a lot of leaves plastered all over it. Much is made of the fact that she doesn't have enough time to stick on all the leaves properly, but not the fact that there isn't much of an underlying idea.

And then it turns out that Kara made a terrific, detailed dress when we weren't looking.

Nearly everyone has focused on leaves and shied away from flowers, flowers being dangerously fragile. Daniel was the only one to use many flowers, and the judges really wanted to see that. So he wins. He now seems to be so much the frontrunner to win the whole season.

And Andrae must leave. Oh! I'd grown to love him. But his Spanish moss thing really was doormat-y. It didn't fit at all. And it was quite a cop out to just shape the whole thing out of moss. (Hey, remember the moss wall on "Trading Spaces"? Moss is doom!)

Andrae interviews that he thought he was an angel floating above all the problems, and it's tough to discover that he's a human being like everyone else. Ah! The men thought they were all safe and surely one of the women would go home tonight. So I guess I'm glad to see that they were the ones who sustained the loss. But I did really like dear, sweet Andrae.

Slow-cooked bog bodies.

Mummified by peat moss. We learn some interesting things about these well-preserved people from 2,000 years ago. One used "a type of Iron Age hair gel; a vegetable plant oil mixed with a resin," and another was "horrifically tortured before death."

Turtles, frogs.

[UPDATE: Sorry turtle and frog fans. The photographs here were stored on a Mac.com page which — though I paid for it — Apple took down before I had the chance to relocate the photographs. I've attempted to restore the images using The Wayback Machine, but somehow this one is irretrievable. It hurts me more than it hurts you.]

A little girl was led by her father to the end of the wooden pier that extends into the Turtle Pond in Central Park. One second before she looks over the end of the pier, she says, "There are no turtles." Then:


Ah! There are 10 big--foot long--turtles right there. And optimism is instilled next to the little girl's skepticism. And here's a little boy reaching up toward an exotic frog. See the other one right there in the middle? (Now we're at the Frogs exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.)


Here's a frog that looks like moss.


This one is not inclined to blend in: