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. This year’s Washington Botanical Symposium (March 8th) 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 Quinaults 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. This writer’s great-grandfather, homesteading on the Pilchuck, put down thin red cedar poles and covered them with moss before laying his homestead cabin’s floor. Moss, to pioneers, was used for mechanical, rather than medicinal, use; e.g. the Farm has adopted the Pilchuck Glass School’s use of emerald green because of a debate won by Dale Chihuly years ago, “everything up here in Freeborn/Victoria Heights turns green like moss, we might as well use green.” Perhaps not important enough to note here, but at our next-door glass school, COLOR IS IMPORTANT. As with 99% of all the Earth’s native plants, few if any modern studies of these species’ unique molecules have been reported. Some species have taken 3 ½ million of years to evolve under intense stress and we don’t know, can’t imagine, why or how. Of the Earth’s 18,500 Bryophyte species and the ~250,000 vascular, 25% of today’s medicines derive from but 40 native plant species, none of them Bryophytes. Unlike with Cascadia’s 900 flowering plant species, the use of forestry herbicides has shown little effect (mosses have no vascular system, can not be treated “systemically”). They are however, greatly affected by pollution and climate change in that many do not disperse easily (few spores, no seeds.) Their difficulties in migrating will likely contribute to the ongoing loss of biodiversity in the Northwest.
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/
Gardens Prose & Primary Level Question
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