Moss Canyon – the heart thrills

Milan, 16 December 2024

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but I could never figure out what my angle should be. The thing is, I want to write about mosses, but once you’ve said that mosses can be really beautiful, there’s nothing much more to say about them. I could blather on about their biology and ecology, but only muscophiles would find that interesting. Looking at them from a historical point of view doesn’t help much, either: as far as I can tell, they haven’t played a significant role in anyone’s history. They do have some practical uses, like bedding and wound dressings, but nothing that really stands out. And forget the dietary angle: no-one eats moss unless they are starving, so there are no interesting dishes to report on. So the post has remained unwritten.

But now, finally, I’ve decided. Since there’s not much to write about on mosses, I’ll focus on photos instead. This post will be a photo essay celebrating their beauty! (That being said, I’ll still write some stuff – I can’t stop myself – but it will be more like extended titles to the photos).

I have to start in Japan, because it is moss country par excellence: something like 1,800 species of moss, or around 15% of the world’s total, grow on its islands. It was there, back in 1985 when my wife and I toured the country for a month, that we first appreciated the beauty of mosses. Our first experience was on the island of Hokkaido, where we were taken to visit the Moss Canyon in Shikotsu-Tōya National Park. It’s more of a gorge, really, about 200 metres long with walls some 5 metres high. These walls are covered in velvety green moss.

Later, when we went to Kyoto, one of the temples we visited was Saihōji, whose entire garden is cloaked in moss.

Other temples we have visited in Kyoto over the years have integrated moss into the overall design of their gardens. This example, from Tofukuji temple, is one of the more intriguing.

Many have even integrated moss into what you might think of as a most unmossy place, their dry rock gardens, where moss is often used to create islands in the sea of pebbles, like this example, also from Tofukuji temple.

Here are the islands up close.

Here is another example, from Ryoanji temple.

But moss found out in Japan’s nature can be just as beautiful. Here are various photos I’ve taken over the last few years during our annual stay in Japan.

A moss-covered log on the flanks of mount Kurama, north of Kyoto.

Fallen Japanese maple leaves smothering a field of moss, out in Ararshiyama in the north-west of Kyoto.

A tree stump crowned with moss, on the Kumano kodo trail.

A stone basin with a moss-covered rim, seen on the same trail.

A stone lantern, being slowly colonized by moss.

An abandoned motorbike, also being slowly colonized by moss.

Japan is the land of moss, but it is also the land of fire, as we saw up close on that visit to Hokkaido’s Shikotsu-Tōya National Park

Iceland, too, is a land of fire, as we have recently been reminded.

But, as my wife and I discovered when we hiked the Laugavegur trail a few years ago, Iceland is also a land of moss.

The contrast could not be starker. One island country has lush vegetation of which moss is but a part. The other has little vegetation, its climate being too harsh. And yet mosses manage to thrive. Which was just as well for us because wherever there was water they covered with ethereal green the otherwise denuded landscape which we hiked past.