MossWorlds

Tag: botany

  • Workshop 2: Storying the Archive

    Workshop 2: Storying the Archive

    Herbaria and Poetry as Research Method 

    The morning session of this wonderful second workshop consisted of a tour of Manchester Museum’s Herbarium, under the expert guidance of Curator of Botany Dr Rachel Webster. Entering the herbarium imparted a feeling of childlike wonder, the promise of things waiting to be discovered. Drawers and drawers of the dried remains of mossworlds – ‘crispy and dry’, as Rachel said, rather than plump and verdant – lined narrow corridors. Here innumerable plants and plant parts are stored, after having been collected, preserved, filed and catalogued. The herbarium is also full of beautiful historical artefacts: Victorian cabinets and ornate boxes – or little wooden slides framing the minute remains of bryophytes suspended in amber resin. The plants, carefully pressed and dried, can look very different from how they would have appeared in life – and this is particularly true of mosses. Drained of colour, flattened and desiccated, they are separated from their worlds of relations, saved as individual specimens, taxonomised.  

    Many of the mosses have been collected in standard-construction envelopes (‘moss packets’), made of whatever paper the collector had to hand. The middle-class collectors in the nineteenth century were often employees of cotton-trading companies, shipping companies or other businesses and these occupations and their ephemera are reflected in what Rachel called an ‘accidental archive’. Such objects tell their own stories, alongside and entangled with the stories of moss. A sample of sphagnum cymbifolium collected at Coombs Moss on 6 June 1901 is folded up in a piece of paper printed with advice for those wishing to speculate safely (to whom some ‘carefully compiled guides’ can be sent, gratis!); another is tucked in an envelope whose yellowed outer side sports a single large advertisement for ‘How to Make a Good Income with Small Capital.’ It promises that ‘You will profit by reading’ its contents. This accidental archive, with its glimpsed stories and material clues, is a suggestive and intimate companion of the ‘official’ botanical archive. Yet the latter, too, holds stories that are only partially known – with much that has been hidden by the archival framing itself, and the politics and practicalities of botanical collecting.  

    Despite the sheer variety and wealth of material Rachel had selected for us, we were left with the realisation that we had seen only a tiny fraction of the herbarium’s extensive moss-related collections. All of these things – the herbarium as a space, the specimens it contains as well as their related material cultures – can tell us a lot about previous generations’ ways of knowing moss: what they thought was important, how they sought to preserve that knowledge, what they valued and why. The aesthetic pleasure we found in the archive was mingled with our awareness of the complex histories of collecting; the ethical and political dimensions of botanical knowledge production. The visit was lively, stimulating and fun – but it also invited us to reflect on the histories, assumptions and habits that shape our own practices; it made us think carefully about the contexts in which we do our work, and its ethical implications.  

    The museum specimens are full of stories waiting to be (re)told, of the plants themselves, but also of time and place. The second session of the day – a poetry workshop led by archaeologist-poet-researcher Dr Abbi Flint – ‘rhymed’ with the herbarium tour as it invited us to engage with the accidental and official archive, with playful seriousness. Poetry can feel very daunting to many of us, and we knew that this session would coax us into unfamiliar territory. Since the willingness to try the new, even to feel vulnerable, is for us very much at the heart of interdisciplinary collaboration, we hoped that everyone would feel able and willing to be open to what the session proposed. 

    After fortifying ourselves with coffee and cake, we entered the grand surroundings of the Council Chamber, located in the Whitworth Building designed by the famous Alfred Waterhouse at the end of the nineteenth century. The space could easily have been intimidating, but we chose it because it – like the herbarium – offers a powerful reminder of the history, wealth and clout of such an institution. Abbi spoke to us about poetry as a research method and opened the session with a ‘free writing’ exercise, in which we responded to prompts that asked us to re-collect sensory details of moss (what it looks, feels, sounds like). This loosened up our writing muscles, as well as returning us to embodied encounters with mosses in diverse places such as urban streets, suburban gardens, upland peat bogs or damp riverbanks. A second exercise involved beautifully-crafted ‘moss packets’ that Abbi had made with paper featuring extracts from nineteenth-century bryological writings. Each envelope contained a picture of a particular moss, with its name and identifying features, and small pieces of paper bearing words commonly associated with moss (‘green’, ‘damp’, ‘soft’). Drawing on these, we wrote our own poems about ‘our’ moss. The final exercise was the ‘found poem’ – here we worked with the text extracts that were printed on the envelopes.

    Crossing out parts of sentences until only the most striking phrases remained, we then created poems out of those words, new and old voices mingling. This was a perfect rejoinder to our herbarium visit, opening up an unexpected (and unexpectedly moving) way of engaging with historical materials: a way of escaping the structures and strictures of knowing moss that previous collectors had set, of looking anew at their worlds of moss – but also of seeing moss anew with the help of their words. The boundaries between ‘scientific’ writing and poetry, research and creativity, came to seem very porous, even if each also maintained its particularity. Abbi expertly created a safe as well as experimental space for us to think and write about mosses in new ways. The session allowed us to engage generatively with the writings of nineteenth-century bryologists, and to find our own (sometimes unsuspected!) voices in and through them.  Do have a look at some of the reflections and poems generously shared by members of the team! 

    Aurora, Ingrid, Anke  

    Reflections from the session convenors

    Rachel: After attending the brilliant first workshop with the combined efforts of Joey Pickard and Henry McPherson, it seemed clear that the best way forward for me would be to respond to the ideas they shared. This would also allow me to lean into one of the strengths of museum collections, helping people to have encounters with real and tangible things that can physically represent knowledge, theories or concepts. With an absolute wealth of ideas raised by the first workshop, it also felt very important to choose which ideas to follow with Abbi Flint so that we could give the afternoon some consistency. 

    Hopefully, the diversion into seaweeds, the beautiful moss model, and the boxed specimens were all helpful to recap some of the challenging bryophyte science and terminology from Joey’s foundational presentation. Books, labels, letters and handwriting represented the collectors, their histories and networks, and type specimens brought up discussions around naming. One thing that particularly spoke to me in workshop one was Joey’s use of scrap paper from a printer for moss-packet making. It was very reminiscent of the old moss packets in the museum’s collection, and I knew I wanted to show as many as possible in this workshop. I was delighted to find that Abbi was also excited to explore them. There is huge potential in the ‘accidental archive’ that develops in collections like a herbarium, where people have used all kinds of scrap papers to preserve their precious specimens. 

    Henry’s musical workshop was deeply rooted in our understandings of mosses, our encounters with them and emotion connections we may feel towards them. Collating our descriptive words revealed many similarities between us all, especially around notions of vitality, vivid colours and dampness. This is almost the exact opposite of describing the materiality of a herbarium collection. However, both bryologists (then and now) will be very familiar with dry moss collections. The way they identify mosses and understand their biology will have to encompass this duality of the characteristics between the living and the dried moss. I wanted to make sure that everyone had access to diverse material to explore this alternative moss world. 

    I have to admit I was approaching a poetry workshop with some trepidation, but Abbi skilfully introduced us to poetic inquiry and took us through several enjoyable writing exercises. I was surprised to find it quite easy to let the words flow when free writing, and the moss-packet contents were brilliant for helping overcome the blank page and get started (though I’m making no claims to quality!). What surprised me most was how challenging it was to repurpose the words of others into a poem. I have had years of training and experience working with the words of others, and it was so hard to step away from that; to prevent myself writing an abstract, or an extracted object label or abbreviated wall-text. I found myself looking to retain the original meaning or feeling and editing the text rather than using it as a source. More practise needed for this skill! 

    Abbi: In planning my contribution to this creative, interdisciplinary project, I was conscious that this was part of our ongoing collaborative conversations, opened so wonderfully by Joey and Henry in the first workshop. The different frameworks they provided had already prompted me to think about how I understand and relate to mosses in new ways. So many fascinating threads emerged from this workshop and it was difficult to decide where to focus for our poetic explorations, but there were a number of themes that I was particularly drawn to—the diversity of moss collectors and their practices, the different ways of naming of mosses and the meanings these evoke, and the embodied and sensorial nature of our encounters with mosses.

    I was excited when Anke, Aurora, and Ingrid suggested that mine and Rachel’s contributions would be paired under the theme of ‘storying the archive’. Not least as I couldn’t wait to learn more about the collections in the museum’s herbarium and get to see behind the scenes of the museum! Rachel and I met in advance and she gave me a sneak preview into some of the materials she would be sharing, including texts and letters written by nineteenth century bryologists that I could draw on in the writing exercises.

    Rachel’s tour of the herbarium was expertly curated and guided. I felt a sense of childlike wonder exploring the beauty and depth of the material she had selected. There was so much poetry here: the words of labels and archival texts, the physicality of the herbarium itself—its smells, sounds and textures—and the feelings and insights these evoked. One of the highlights for me was the ‘accidental’ (almost archaeological) archive of the moss packets themselves, which gave me the idea for the poetic moss packets I prepared for the workshop.

    My workshop was very much an invitation for people to experiment with poetic approaches to thinking and writing with moss and archival materials, and I was thrilled that people seemed to accept this invitation and engage with the texts and their own writing practices in playful and thoughtful ways. We did not share our writing in the workshop, but some people generously shared their work with me after the session. I was struck by the different directions people had taken these in (even when working with the same texts) and the close attending that infused the poems, crafted with such care and insight. I hope to read more of this creative work as the project progresses.

  • Workshop 1: Meeting Mosses

    Workshop 1: Meeting Mosses

    Our first interdisciplinary MossWorlds workshop took place on the 20th of September, with a morning session facilitated by bryologist Joey Pickard and an afternoon with musician and improviser Henry McPherson. In this post, project leads Anke, Ingrid and Aurora share their individual and collective reflections on the event.  

    Aurora: In bringing together colleagues from across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and a diverse field of arts, a core ambition of the MossWorlds project is to build an interdisciplinary approach to knowing mosses that does not reduce or subordinate any one way of knowing mosses to another. In our first MossWorlds workshop we confronted the challenge of interdisciplinarity directly, pairing natural science and improvisational music as two ways of knowing moss that are not only distinct from one another – and from many of the colloquial knowledges of moss that each of us brought to the day – but in some ways non-translatable: they drew us into different moss worlds. If attention mosses (with their great variety often overlooked due to the ordinariness of their presence) lends itself to what social Anthropologist Anna Tsing’s call for an ‘art of noticing’, then our first workshop reminded us that, as social theorist Martin Savransky writes, ‘what is required of an art of noticing is not learning to see things differently, but learning to see different things’ (2021: 42). Our morning session brought us into seeing moss through the lens of bryology, understanding the biological, ecological and taxonomical characteristics that make mosses unique within the plant world and key components within the diverse landscape ecologies they inhabit, including the peatlands where sphagnum mosses play a critical role in carbon sequestration. In the afternoon session we were invited to think about moss relationally, through our own encounters and relations with mosses as well as imagining and expressing – through musical improvisation – what it is to be in relation with, and indeed, to be moss. 

    Ingrid: The bryology session drew our attention to the huge variety of mosses in the UK (over 1000 species), and their different forms and habitats. Joey’s story of mosses being overlooked in the world of nature TV programming reminded me of some words in the introduction to Frances E. Tripp’s British Mosses: Their Homes, Structure, Aspects and Uses (1873):   

    At the very idea of studying mosses a clamour of objections arises… Mosses! Mosses  upon the wall! There can surely be little to say of them. Mosses! There must be so  much to say of them that it is hardly possible to learn it. There is no use in a book  about what we have no hope of understanding. Mosses! They can be understood we  suppose, but they are so extremely difficult, and they require you to put your eyes out  in looking through a microscope… thank you, we do not wish to know anything about  mosses. (p. 2).  

    But Joey’s work, like Tripp’s back in 1873, highlighted how very much close attention to these tiny lifeforms with their single-cell leaves yields not only varieties of knowledge about small specificities and large interconnections, but also delight – a word I’ve noticed in use as well by the Victorian amateur botanist, teacher and writer, Leo Grindon, about the ways nineteenth-century working-class botanists and bryologists developed and shared their knowledge of plant life (1882: 203). A similar sense of delight permeated the afternoon session, when Henry invited us to play on and with a variety of homemade instruments. The workshop encouraged us to listen, to pay attention to each other and to sound, to the small and intricate as well as the communal and co-operative, and to what is tentative and lightly anchored as well as to persistence, recurrence and repeated rhythms. What a day of green pleasures and discoveries.   

    Anke: Expectations and Resonances were themes that came up for me across the two sessions and in relation to the event of an opening workshop for a new project and a new group of collaborators and co-creators. What expectations did each of us bring into the room? Of (and for) ourselves but also each other and mosses. What resonances emerged – across the group, the individual sessions and the disciplinary as well as creative perspectives that were brought into conversation? 

    One theme that recurred in both sessions was that mosses confound expectations in a range of ways (they are small but important; they have been called ‘primitive’ but have complex structures and interactions with others; they are ‘old’ and ‘slow’ but incredibly adaptive and resilient). Mosses confound expectations, baffle or present challenges to knowledge. This, perhaps, is why we find them on the margins, of disciplines and of civic spaces. Maybe this is also one reason why they have often attracted those on the margins: artisan botanists, non-conformists, women botanists, artists and others who are themselves surprised at falling for mosses when they didn’t expect to.  

    At the same time as confounding expectations, mosses facilitate relation, resonating across time and areas of expertise or practice. Perhaps because of their size, they (initially, at least) don’t overwhelm, inviting us to step closer. There seems to be something faintly humorous about studying mosses; people often smile or chuckle when I mention this is what I’m doing. Mosses seem to many pointless, useless – but this also emboldens people to speak out and to ask questions. Mosses offer a small opening onto new conversations and potential connections.  

    Listening and improvising with mosses was a new practice for me. It did not come ‘naturally’ and I found it challenging, both because I do not consider myself musically skilled and because I was not sure I understood how to do this ‘right’. In a gentle way, it drew attention to underlying assumptions of expertise and to the process of interdisciplinary work itself (how do we genuinely tune in to mosses and to one another?). It reminded us of the importance of playfulness and the flexibility of rules. It drew attention to the embodied aspect of knowledge creation, something that is often ignored or even denied. It reminded us of where and how we are placed; the ways in which we ‘show up’ to our work and for each other. 

    Anke, Ingrid and Aurora:  

    We are setting out in this project to explore botanical, political and aesthetic aspects of mosses, taking inspiration from the variety and vitality of mosses for our own approach to their study. We hope to develop new understandings of the pasts, presents and futures of moss and mosses as we develop new interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborations – playful, embodied and deeply serious. Robin Wall Kimmerer notes that ‘mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time at the limits of ordinary perception. All it requires of us is attentiveness.’ (2003:10). This first workshop has helped us begin to pay attention in new ways.   

    Among the oldest land plants on earth, mosses helped to create the ‘atmosphere’ that made land-based life on earth possible. They are, in this sense, ancient, durable and at the beginning of earthly life. In narrative theory, beginnings are often considered with caution: their claims to primacy, to origins, to explanatory power, can be – and often are – used in dangerous ways.  Mosses are also nimble, resilient and adaptable; as Kimmerer observes, they ‘have a covenant with change’ (p. 37). The ‘story’ of mosses is mutable and ongoing. It aligns more closely with what Ursula K. Le Guin has called the ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ – with ‘continuing process’ rather than dramatic swings between conflict and resolution. This workshop can thus be considered both a beginning of sorts and not a beginning at all. While it asked participants to step away from certainty, from already-fixed perspectives or assumptions, it acknowledged the histories and specialisms that each brought to the room. Through a shared process of paying attention to and with mosses, we hope to change the atmosphere. 

    Joey and Henry reflect on the first workshop

    Joey: It’s not often that you find yourself in a room full of people who appreciate bryophytes and it’s even less often that such a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines come together to explore the subject. The first day for the Moss Worlds project that I was involved with was split into two halves, the first being an introduction to bryophytes session by myself and the second a free improvisation workshop run by Henry. The reaction to the introduction to bryophytes session was positive beyond anything I had hoped in the run up to the workshop, with the level of engagement from the audience and the questions raised during and after it was clear that the project has managed to pull together a truly impressive cohort of people working together to explore our relationship with mosses. The diversity of interests from the aesthetic, political and ecological backgrounds highlights the impact that this kind of project design is capable of, and it’s exciting to be a part of.

    The afternoon session run by Henry was something that I was incredibly grateful to be able to stay and experience, being mostly a field based ecologist and bryologist it was an entirely new experience for me. The framework that Henry introduced for exploring mosses and our relationship with them was fascinating and getting a room full of academics to engage in an improvisational musical workshop in the way that he did took real skill. So often in science and academia, particularly the side I work in most, we focus so much on the side of knowledge that measures and defines a given thing that our relationship to them and how we experience them is forgotten. It was a real joy to begin to explore that with the group involved in the Moss Worlds project.

    Henry: It isn’t often that this many people interested in learning about mosses are gathered together’ was the sentiment I took from the opening of Joey Pickard’s fantastically informative introduction to bryophyte ecology. On 20th September 2024, we had come together in one of the committee rooms in the Whitworth Hall at the University of Manchester. In the buildings around us, excited groups of new students were shepherding themselves along corridors, while outside, newly dug ‘micro-ponds’ in the renovated courtyard were filling with rainwater, and the leaves were beginning to turn.

    For our audience of artists, literary scholars, geographers, curators, microbiologists, botanists, and environmental scientists, Joey managed to convey both in breadth and depth his enthusiasm and expertise in the world of mosses and wider bryophytes. We received a crash-course in moss-packet making, identifying different types of bryophytes (leafy, thalloid, and my favourite term ‘hyperoceanic’), and the ethics of collecting and sampling. For me, though, what were maybe most integral to this introduction were Joey’s stories.

    Joey described trudging across peatland, bog, and forest to demarcate a bryophyte community to protect them from logging machines. He told us how his helpful canine assistant liked to chomp on moss samples, described the rich history of working-class contributions within bryophyte gathering and research communities, and spoke to the importance of mosses in cultivating a sense of place and heritage, referencing his own home and work in the valleys of South Wales. He recounted to us, with joy and pride, the process of finding, identifying, and naming an unknown species of moss, (the importance of this experience for him not necessarily reflected in the size of the species’ entry in a botanical index). And he expressed to us in various forms (anecdotes, images, graphs, data) the importance of bryophytes within contemporary climate narratives: their role in the biodiversity of micro- and macro-eco-communities; their responsibility and capacities for carbon sequestering; and their affordances as ‘ecosystem engineers’, adept at regulating water flow and acidifying peatland environments.

    This grounding in the botanical, as well as the social and cultural history of bryophyte ecology felt like an important and broadly accessible place to start our interdisciplinary research into moss worlds. For my part, I was a little starstruck by the presence of a bryologist in the room, having had an artistic and philosophical interest (if not obsession) around mosses for some years, but never braving a bryology meeting. Joey’s introduction felt like an excellent way of easing us into bryophilia – not overly complex, but hugely informative. It also allayed some of my trepidation, as a participant and as the workshop-leader for the afternoon, around stepping into a botanical research area without any claim to academic biological expertise, in the disciplined, scientific sense.