In “Gathering Moss”, Robin Kimmerer writes, “I teach bryology in the summer, wandering through the woods, sharing mosses. . . . On the trail and in the lab, I like to listen to my students talk. Day by day, their vocabulary stretches and they proudly refer to leafy green shoots as “gamentophytes” . . . Having words for these forms makes the difference between them so much more obvious. With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.”
In one of George Orwell’s essays he notes that over time where once people passing by could name the flowers, at some point they merely point and say pretty. Some of this loss is due to fast travel by car, some by disinterest, and some by not having an old person to walk the child through the place saying, “This is bloodroot; that is a beech.”
east of the fog 