In Love with Moss

I wrote this short piece some time ago (it must have been a year ago as I approach my fifty eighth birthday) and was reminded of it this afternoon as I walked to the top of the garden, sat on a bench and looked down Loch Linnhe and realised that it is the season of change. The winter pallet of subtle colour is replaced by a crescendo of growth that is so amplified when you live in the north. Five months of warmth, green and the buzz of bees before the first autumn colour will appear. From the washed out muteness of pale naples yellow and indian red, in a month or less, we will be assailed with greens of every shade, sprinkled with the stars of flower colour like hundreds and thousands on a cake, or more poetically, the stars in the sky. At last we have seen the stars in the last week or two, and more recently have been blessed with a huge golden moon. What a change from the endless grey and cloud cover we have had since November……much the same all over Britain I believe but stretching even the Highland lover we both are, to the limit none the less. But before the winter fades into spring and then the summer, I want to tell you about moss.

The colours found in moss are the strongest to be found during the winter months, and instead of walking past the miniature plants, more gripped by the larger forms of hill and tree, they become jewel like as if the detail of a medieval tapestry and you half expect a unicorn to trot into view.

In Love with Moss

           As a child I spent almost every school holiday at my grandmothers house in Scotland. There was an enormous garden. So enormous, in fact, that the fence was said to be two miles long.  A garden of that size is really a wilderness where in parts it is more cultivated than others. But the site and the trees and the planting by successive generations, not just of my family but by previous owners too, gives it a very established feeling. In places it is entirely natural and wild.

From quite a young age I spent much time in the garden, and as the eldest of five children, almost invariably alone but close enough to adults and “home” for it to be considered safe. Gradually, by degrees, I found a place that felt entirely sympathetic, safe and comfortable. It was at the foot of an oak tree where a small stream dropped by a number of miniature cascades down the slope between mossy banks and roots. I don’t believe that I had read The Borrowers or that anyone had read them to me. Indeed, I have a faint memory of finding the idea rather spooky and frightening! So, maybe, my idea borrowed nothing from them although it is clearly a universal one!

I remember lying on the ground, gazing at the trickle of water that dropped through the moss and stones, imagining myself to be small enough for the miniature cliffs and caves to be my whole world and everything lined with the indefinable green of moss, still to this day the most elusive and irresistible colour. The pebbles, wet in the stream bed, glistened and became enticing jewels of granite, quartz or mica just as they still do when walking on the beach. Without much imagination this became my “Fairy Land” and I longed to shrink to such tiny proportions that I could live there amongst the soft green colour. It is hard now to remember how I thought it would work. The gift of childhood enables fantasy and play rather like playing with a dolls house. But a house is an imitation of adult lives. I never played with a dolls house and don’t think I either had or wanted one but I dreamt of living outside, small enough to find shelter and warmth in all that olive green velvet that the moss became.

Now I am about to be fifty-seven in 2013 and after a life of vicissitudes, I am again in the Highlands. This time involved in the making of a garden myself. And the garden we tend faces towards the north with views of Ben Nevis glowering in the distance. There could not be a better environment in which to grow moss. And so I have come full circle and garden with a hand brush, sweeping old leaves and dead grass away from my tapestry of green where the need for other plants often feels superfluous.