I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University.
It is easy to believe Princeton is a lifeless place. We are told otherwise, and often, by administration. It's only the occasional squirrel whose gaze locks ours that might really convince us otherwise, on the optical and temporal scale we are forced to engage in this quotidian student-hood.
My mom loves collecting moss-- she once made me carry home a giant 75+ lbs log covered in so many varieties of moss from the forest at the end of the street because it delighted her. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us to look at moss in its incredible diversity-- and so I turned to that which creeps through the cracks of academia.
I was curious about the mutualism seemingly emerging between common chickweed and a moss species emerging in the cracks of the large stone pavement beneath Fine Hall. Moss is apparently quite the spatial opportunist— open space on a stone, and it’s time to slowly take hold, build up a layer of not-stone beneath it, a thriving world from which other things may claim its space in geo-bio-time. Did the architects plan for this tiny landscape to take hold? Will the moss win in its takeover, thus tearing up the pavement, the very grounds of the hallowed Princeton University?
More scientifically, is moss facilitating common chickweed? And how? And, what is a moss ontologically? Is what I’m perceiving not really a forest of smaller plants, a variegated topographical site whose individual leaves are so small I neglect their photosynthetic, abundant diversity?
I mounted a bit of this small moss— its edges suggesting a google-earth image of an especially light green alpine forest, perhaps. Who lives here, in this immense forest?
What emerges is the boxy components of tiny leaves, a brown stem holding them all together. A tree indeed?
A question of scale persists— are the roots of the chickweed enormous redwoods bursting forth at speeds unattainable by the moss? Certainly chickweed pays for this lifecycle and size decision— I will certainly not see the chickweed come July, but the moss will be there, steady as its stone home.
It remains unclear, too, that I’m looking only at one ‘moss.’ Perhaps the chickweed ‘redwoods’ are hardly a problem, but on the tiny and slow scale, other mosses compete for the same environmental niche, the same limited rock resources. Perhaps they find specialization through different tethering, different shape ‘leaves,’ and thus mutually constitute a moss-wide-network.
Perhaps I won’t see the moss either— rushing by on the way to our next 1.30. Whether the foldscope offers taxonomic possibilities, or a simple visibilization of impossibly tiny & varied leaves, I’m grateful for the moment to do so.