Did you know that Vancouver Island’s northern Brooks Peninsula and the Stillaguamish River (our Farm and Bonhoeffer Botanical Gardens’) watershed share certain unique Bryophytes (mosses) found nowhere else in Cascadia? We have planted over a dozen species that do not disperse easily, with no seeds and few spores, collected for Pilchuck Learning Center by a University of Washington herbarium instructor in Barlow Pass. A Washington Botanical Symposium (March 8, 2020) presentation, “The Immensity of Minutia: Utilizing Bryophytes to Detect an Ice Age Refugium in the North Cascades” (M. Berkey), described why the South Fork of the Stillaguamish River (to which the Gardens’
waters flow) share rare mosses with the Brooks Peninsula on northern Vancouver Island. 15,000 years ago, the Gardens, Farm, and Seattle were covered with a glacier a mile high. North of Nootka Sound and the upper reaches of the Stillaguamish’s South Fork were refuges not covered by ice. Melting waters south of Seattle flowed to the west, perhaps over time explaining why the Quinault share the Salishan Language Family with those in the Salish Sound (and not the extinct Chimakum language to their north or Willapa Bay’s Shoalwater Tribe’s Athabaskan to their south). ~13,000 species of moss exist worldwide, a speaker cited ~600 species in Cascadia Floristic Region (UW Symposium, 2018), with 1% reported as ethnobotanicals; note the limited uses in Cascadia Floristic Region in the naeb.brit URL below.
http://naeb.brit.org/uses/search/?string=moss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordilleran_ice_sheet
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/2205422
https://www.ehow.com/info_12045305_kills-weeds-but-not-moss.html
https://www.spokaneaquifer.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/back-iceagemap.pdf
https://botanicgardens.uw.edu/education/adults/conferences-symposia/wa-botanical-symposium/
15,000 years ago the area now holding the City of Seattle was under how many feet of ice?
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