Moss

We've done stripping experiments where we've removed mats of epiphytes and looked at the rates of recolonization.

Well, my thought was that I could learn how to grow mosses, and that way we wouldn't have to take them out of the wild.

And these mosses, generated by decomposing, are like peat moss in your garden.

Many species of mosses, and then all sorts of lichens just plastering the tree.

I'm trying to travel there to find 5,000 year old moss, which lives on the Antarctic Peninsula.

In the Pacific Northwest, there's a whole industry of moss harvesting from old growth forests.

And they embraced the idea that they could help develop a research design in order to grow these mosses.

These mosses are taken from the forest they're used by the floriculture industry, by florists, to make arrangements and make hanging baskets.

And these would be the kind of trees that might have been there, and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses, the butterflies, the fish in the stream, the birds in the trees.

We've been successful as partners in figuring out which species grow the fastest, and I've just been overwhelmed with how successful this has been.

They learned how to distinguish different species of mosses, which, to tell you the truth, is a lot more than my undergraduate students at the Evergreen College can do.

Tess, Tess!

Tess, Tess?

Tess, Tess?

Tess, Tess Mannering.

One of the surprising things I discovered is that, if you pull back with me on those mats of epiphytes, what you'll find underneath them are connections, networks of what we call canopy roots.

Tess?

Tess?

Tess!

Tess.

Oh Tess!

Hi Tess.

And so, I thought perhaps incarcerated men and women who don't have access to nature, who often have a lot of time, they often have space, and you don't need any sharp tools to work with mosses would be great partners.

Gather moss?

Tess, get UP!

Grass, stones, lichen...

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Tess, are you out there?

Tess, where are you?

Tess, where are you?

What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a shrub comprised of thousands of branches, each containing clusters of tiny green leaves at the end and so densely packed together that you could actually stand on top of it.

These epiphytes are mainly dominated by the mosses.

Millay. Tess Millay.

Yeah, I'm afraid it is, Tess.

I tell them tenderly

Oh, hello. Hello my name is Tess.

Tess, that's not funny.

Tess, what are you afraid of?

Though he bought some peat moss from me one time.

Tedeschi, Maria.

Oh let her come, Libby. Come on, Tess.

Kit, Tess is gone!

Tess, if this is a joke.

Sister!