deter competitors, but usually he saves the display for females.
The male may have impressive aerial skills and a fancy appearance, but since I began watching and being involved in the lives of my visitors, I have developed a great deal of respect for the ferocity and endurance of the single mothers. Without my realizing it, over time, the lives of these birds right outside my windows have become woven into my own as we both go about our daily routines together, separated by a pane of glass.
The Patina of Time
To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain . . . .
—James Hutton, Theory of the Earth
Before I climbed up onto the railing outside our back door, I first looked around to see if any neighbors were in their yards or walking down the alley. When the coast was clear, I hauled myself up and stood on the railing before stepping across the gap to the roof of our detached garage. I scooted on my backside across the roof, where I lay down, stretched out across the asphalt shingles.
Conventional wisdom says that moss on your roof is bad and that it’ll make the shingles too wet, causing them to rot, or that the roots will lift up the shingles, leading to water damage. A mossy roof is considered an eyesore in the city and better suited to a rustic old cabin in the woods. But I’m curious and tend to question the status quo.
As I lay on my belly, I studied the rows of moss organized neatly along the shingle edges. The moss grew in tiny clumps, no more than a half-inch wide at most. The little green tufts with silver tips were nothing short of adorable, a miniature landscape growing far above the ground. I saw no shingles being forced up into the air, and when I pulled a couple clumps off, they came up easily, without a fight, leaving nothing behind. I couldn’t see any damage at all. As I studied the moss, poking and prodding at it, I began to question whether it really needed to be removed.
The problem, I quickly found, was that there are scant studies conducted on roof moss. Some sources, notably roofing companies, say moss is damaging. Others, like those of the green roof industry, state that moss can be beneficial, protecting shingles from sun damage. But the information on both sides is largely anecdotal. Since there was no consensus, I turned to the person whose name is synonymous with moss: botanist and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer. In her book Gathering Moss, Kimmerer writes that while mosses do produce tiny rhizoids, which are the moss equivalent of roots, she strongly doubts they “could pose a serious threat to a well-built roof.”
And yet, in a city where everything is meticulously maintained and managed, moss defies our modern, neat and tidy landscapes. A mossy roof is a mark of age. We accept moss in the forest or on an ancient stone wall in the country without question, but in the city, we’ve decided it’s unseemly and must be scraped away.
When we moved into our house, I was happy when the moss began spreading under our maple tree. It was pretty, softer to sit on, and didn’t require any maintenance. I considered it a win-win. I’m not alone in thinking a blanket of moss is preferable to the dramatically higher maintenance grass. In recent years the idea of a moss lawn has grown on gardening websites and in books, and now you can buy moss in sheets or as a blended moss and yogurt milkshake to spread out and grow in your garden. But it’s not a new idea; gardeners have used moss as a deliberate design element for almost seven hundred years.
Not far from Seattle is a place that has become famous for its moss garden, and one day I traveled across Puget Sound on the ferry Wenatchee to Bainbridge Island, where the Bloedel Reserve is located. During the passage I stood on the front deck, braced against the cold winter air as I looked for orcas and birds. A few gulls flew overhead along with the ferry, as though escorting it across the Salish Sea.
By the time I’d driven to the Bloedel Reserve, on the opposite end of Bainbridge Island, I had just about warmed up. For more than thirty years the 150-acre reserve was the private landscape of Virginia and Prentice Bloedel. Mr. Bloedel had a complicated relationship with the land; he was heir to his family’s timber business but he was also an environmentalist. Under his leadership, the company was the first to plant seedlings after harvesting the trees. Following his retirement, his connection to the land played out in the Bloedel Reserve, where he frequently walked and worked with landscape architects to form the grounds. Today the reserve contains formal gardens, woodland trails, meadows, and the award-winning Garden Sequence containing four “rooms,” including the Moss Garden.
The Bloedel Reserve’s Moss Garden is legendary not only locally but widely among landscape architects. It’s a place I’d learned about while earning my degree in landscape architecture. I was to meet the garden’s current caretaker, Darren Strenge, and its previous caretaker, Bob Braid—who had tended the Moss Garden since 1985 before handing the reins to Darren and turning to manage the nearby Japanese Garden.
Together, Darren and Bob led me into the Moss Garden, telling me it had been completed in 1982 and was inspired partly by Japanese gardens and partly by the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. At two acres, it is the largest public moss garden in the United States. Designed by acclaimed Seattle landscape architect Richard Haag, the Moss Garden, or Anteroom as it is also known, is part of the Garden Sequence, a series of four rooms starting with the Garden of Planes (now a Japanese rock garden) and moving on to the Anteroom, the Reflection Garden, and the Bird Refuge.
Not only was the idea of a moss garden unique when it was designed, but entire dead logs and stumps were brought in and left to rot in place, to be claimed by moss. Initially, 275,000 plugs of Irish moss (not a moss at all, but a perennial plant) were planted until native mosses took over. And they did, until the garden became a mosaic of varying shades of green containing more than forty species of moss with almost none of the original Irish moss remaining, outcompeted by the native moss.
Throughout the garden, moss-covered mounds of vague, fuzzy shapes—remnants of the original logs—slowly collapse in on themselves as they gradually rot. Bob told me that Mr. Bloedel was fascinated by these stumps and nurse logs. Native plants such as sword fern, evergreen huckleberry, and salal grew on some of the stumps and logs while along the southern edge of the garden, the thorny devil’s club marked the border. Old western red cedars towered over the garden, creating a shifting pattern of light on the ground where the sun filtered through. Moss crept up the flare of the tree trunks, making it hard to distinguish where the ground ended and a tree began.
The more I looked, the more I could begin to detect patterns in the ground. It was not a simple blanket of green, but a complex tapestry of many tones, some tending toward blue, others tipping to yellow. In between the greens stood patches of rust from the reddish capsules of common smoothcap moss. But the pattern isn’t random, and to know the mosses is to understand the various microclimates they favor. Some species are tolerant of the sun and boldly grow where no other mosses dare to creep. Others crowd around the soggier parts of the landscape, wanting to keep their toes constantly wet. Some live high, hanging on the branches of trees and never touching the ground. A few grow side by side, competing in a slow-motion struggle to gain more ground.
As we walked through the moss garden, Darren occasionally hopped off the path to pluck out various species, and I could easily feel his connection to the outdoors. He’s been working at the reserve since 1997 when he decided, after finishing his master’s in botany and working in a lab studying pollen fertility, that he’d rather spend his days outdoors than in a laboratory. He has been getting to know the reserve ever since, and the Moss Garden in particular, after he took over its care in 2017. At one point on our tour, he leaned down over a bed of green, teased out a single tiny plant, and handed it to me. He said it’s called Menzies’ tree moss, and I could easily see why. The foliage of the “tree” sat atop
