In the Moss House

By Abbi Flint

A small outbuilding, a little like a potting shed, tucked away in the corner of the University of Manchester’s Firs environmental research station, holds a cool green room dedicated to mosses, liverworts, and ferns. On the 10th April, I visited this Moss House, expertly guided by Horticultural Technician Osian Thierry, to inform poems that I am writing for the MossWorlds project. Where moss is mentioned in classic poetry, the image of a ‘mossy cell’ is sometimes conjured (such as in poems by both Robert Burns and John Milton), and this feels like an appropriate description of the Moss House. No more than a few metres long and less wide, it has a green gauze covering the roof to diffuse the light, giving it a sense of the enclosed forest environments these plants would thrive in. Being here is an immersive, sensory experience. It has a feel of calm and quiet, the sounds of the city dampened and distant. Osian tells me about the collections, and the history and biology of mosses and liverworts. We search for a liverwort that smells of citrus, and I cannot help but reach out to feel the texture of different species. The soft feathery Oxyrrynchium hians and the waxy flat-fingers of Conocephalum conicum.

The Moss House is carefully and expertly managed to create the ideal conditions for these plants, but there is also a feeling that the mosses are claiming and shaping this space as their own. Not constrained to neat containers or beds, the mosses and liverworts have mingled – reflecting many of the labels’ description of them as ‘cosmopolitan’. They have followed moisture and light to grow up the walls, draped themselves down the edges and legs of the benches, and along the floor. Rocks and dead-wood have been placed amongst the plants to create realistic habitats for them to explore. Only the bare patches of wall beyond the sprinkler’s reach tell of a time before the world was greened by moss.

As well as learning more about moss, part of the reason for my visit was to explore the potential for making poetic connections with the University’s living botanical collections. Before visiting, I had an idea to write small poetic labels for the mosses in in the Moss House, as a complementary way of naming and knowing them, alongside their scientific labels. This idea had been bubbling away since the first MossWorlds workshop led by bryologist Joey Pickard, where he prompted us to think about the history of naming and understanding the character of mosses. The poems would need to be short, small enough to fit on the labels that often accompany plants in botanical gardens, so I experimented with writing haiku. Traditional Japanese haiku are often moving and profoundly felt reflections on nature, time, seasonality and connections to human life. It can also be a deeply attentive form, as Sam Hamill explains in his 2014 book the pocket haiku: ‘a haiku presents a brief meditation in which the reader or listener is invited to participate, using imagery drawn from intensely careful observations.’ This felt like a form that would suit writing about the small but complex world of mosses and our entangled relationships with them.

Spending time in the Moss House, I took photographs of the various species of mosses and some liverworts and made notes about the experience of spending time in this space, quietly attending to the mosses. Later I combined my observations with learning garnered from the notes and field-guides available on the British Bryological Society’s website, to create short poetic descriptions of my encounters with these species. Two of these haiku are included below.

Following my visit, I was also inspired to write a poem about the immersive and multi-sensory experience of being in the Moss House itself. Whilst I was writing this, I attended the final MossWorlds workshop where Dr Abigail Bleach shared insights from her archival research into the history of the Moss House at Manchester, which has also informed this piece.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Oliver Hughes, Osian Thierry and colleagues at the Firs environmental research station for welcoming me to the Moss House.

You can find out more about the Firs here: https://www.ees.manchester.ac.uk/research/facilities/firs-environmental-research-station

The British Bryological Society’s :https://www.britishbryologicalsociety.org.uk/