BY LYN BALDWIN

I’m on my hands and knees when I hear voices. From my perch atop a silty cliff rising from the east side of Okanagan Lake in southern British Columbia, cottonwood leaves shimmer between me and the blue water below. Through gaps in this green curtain, I glimpse bare legs, feet in flip-flops. Two people, maybe more, headed for the beach at Three Mile Point. Nobody looks up and I’m relieved.

Sometimes, it’s just easier not to explain. Especially when I’m burdened with a miscellany of field gear: backpack, binoculars, hand lens, GPS, spray bottle, collecting pouch. Especially when I’m crawling along, nose pressed nearly to the ground, butt up in the air. Especially when I’m looking for a plant that can’t be seen. Or, at least, not seen with the naked eye.

Finding what I’m looking for requires a willingness to plop down on hands and knees, squirt water onto silt, bring hand lens to eye, and fall into the Lilliputian world of a biotic soil crust. Watered under a hand lens, the contorted contours of a dry soil crust will—before your very eyes—uncurl into a sparkling tapestry of green and gold. In BC’s coastal forests, bryophytes—those small mosses and liverworts of the plant kingdom—hang from tree branches, clamber over downed logs, and sprawl across the forest floor. But in a biotic soil crust, mosses, along with lichens, are the trees, towering above a complex web of microscopic cyanobacteria, fungi, and green algae. Within this community, the rare moss I’m looking for, Crossidium seriatum, forms a part of the sub-canopy, growing no taller than a millimeter in height.

If this moss is hard to see, it’s nearly as difficult to identify. Distinguishing this species requires seeing the shape of microscopic bumps found on leaf cells—details only visible if I slice leaves into sections no wider than a human hair and magnify them 100x beneath a compound scope. Given that each Crossidium plant bears only a few leaves, naming this moss risks destroying any specimen I might collect.

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I stand up and the huchar, huchar of California Quail floats up from below. Today, I am alone; last week, three of us—me, my husband and our friend, Terry McIntosh, one of BC’s dryland moss experts—surveyed further north. Crossidum seriatum is a North American species, but in Canada, it’s known only from fifteen sites in the southern interior of BC. Within this restricted geography, it grows only on the fine-grained silts deposited in the bottom of post-glacial lakes and now largely eroded into steep-sided cliffs.

Above me, swallows swoop; out over the lake, an osprey soars. Maybe it’s my solitude, or the overlap between Crossidium’s range and my childhood, but this morning’s search feels caught in a tangle of home and history, of naming and losing. Thirty years ago, this valley was the first home I lost. Its rolling mix of fields and Ponderosa Pine forests, of open grasslands and blue lakes, were the contours I longed for in the late 1970’s when my hippie mother’s spontaneous marriage moved us south of the border to Montana. Twenty-five years later, the science of botany let me return. I’d gone even further afield—to the deciduous forests of Vermont—to learn its nomenclature but the universality of botany’s grammar helped write my ticket back to BC—first temporarily as a doctoral student and then permanently with a faculty position.

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What turns country into home? It’s an old question, but one especially difficult to answer for a rare moss. What does being home mean if your very existence is anchored in place by tiny threads? How does time beat when you can curl up and go dormant, not just for a season, but for multiple years, even decades, before the gift of water plumps you awake again? What is touch for those who live with little or no epidermis—absorbing nutrients and water across their entire bodies? All plants, but perhaps bryophytes most of all, test our imagination.

Still, this type of imagining has deep roots in botany. Some say it was first illustrated in 1804 in the diagram Alexander von Humboldt published to summarize his team’s attempt to climb Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest mountain. In this tableau, the profile of Chimborazo is bounded by thirteen columns, listing the environmental variables measured en route. I’ve never been to Ecuador, but I love this profile for the abbreviated Latin names running amok over the mountain’s surface. Looking, I am forced to move between plant name and variables—catapulting me into the same type of conversation I imagine Humboldt’s team had on the mountain. I become a co-traveller, brushing up against the plants, feeling the prick of their spines and the soft brush of leaves, smelling their fragrance, sensing the pressure and temperature changes that always accompanies an increase in elevation.

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Several hours later, my hands and clothes are covered in a fine silt and my lower back complains. It’s time for a break. I sit on a mostly horizontal ledge and look out. From a distance, the contours of this valley are the same as I remember, but I know that on the plateau immediately above me, vineyards and orchards have left little space for what was once a native grassland enlivened with crust.

Botany may have let me return to BC, but at what cost? In North America, botany is part of what burst, in the words of Indigenous poet and scholar Jeannette Armstrong, “out of the belly of Christopher’s ship, running in all directions, pulling furs off animals, shooting buffalo, shooting each other left and right.” Environmental historians describe my professional ancestors as “agents of empire.” In 1833, when the Scottish plant collector, David Douglas, drew maps of this valley, this lake, his work served the interests of the Horticulture Society of London. And even though collectors like Alexander von Humboldt protested the use of science to justify imperialism, historians like Suzanne Zeller explain that inventory sciences like botany supported the expansion of Canada and the US from one side of the continent to the other.

I don’t disagree, but I worry that perceiving botany only as a tool of empire might underestimate the power of its fieldwork. The most thoughtful collector I’ve ever known was my professor, Dr. Wilf Schofield. Wilf was already retired when I met him. But in the late 1990s, his office—house plants clambering up window sills, CBC Radio Two playing, tea kettle boiling—provided good habitat for me within the University of British Columbia’s Botany Department. One of the foremost bryologists in North America, Wilf, along with his students, spent years mapping the homes of this continent’s bryophytes. I knew none of this when I first met Wilf. He was merely the elderly gentleman my research supervisor sent me to see when I suggested mosses as a model system for my dissertation. Certainly, I had no idea that, for the next six years, Wilf would be the taxonomic cornerstone of my Ph.D. research.

I’d arrive in Wilf’s office with a shoebox of mosses I couldn’t name and in between guiding my identifications, Wilf would tell stories. Some were about his daughters or the rare book he’d found, half-price, in a local bookstore. Others arose from his long history with plants. During his forty-seven years at UBC, Wilf spent most summers in the field. Sometimes, as we sat at his microscopes, Wilf, peering down at a moss, would ask, “Tell me again where you got this?” and then turn to grab the sheaf of maps he kept in his office—each one plotting the distribution of a bryophyte species within the province. I never knew who was more excited—Wilf or me—when one of my collections resulted in a new dot on a map.

Midway through my research, I needed an estimate of mosses’ fidelity to their habitats. I gleaned as much as I could from Wilf’s publications and then sat with him and went through my list of species, one by one. He knew them all—not just their names, but the shape and textures of their individual homes. In more than one hundred species, I didn’t stump him once. Maybe it was then that I recognized how thoroughly Wilf’s mind had been shaped by mosses.

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Botany may be a tool of empire, but today it gave me reason to go outside. Reason to spend this morning in May visiting the valley I once shared with my mother.

My mother. May. Mother’s Day!

For a moment, I panic. And then I remember the cell phone in my pack. Alexander von Humboldt had to wait for his mother to die before he could go plant-hunting; more than 200 years later, my mom sounds thrilled to be called mid-hunt. As we contrast her memories to what I can see, I use my binoculars to track the flight of an osprey. Something white and luminous flashes beneath the canopy of cottonwood leaves immediately below me. An osprey on the ground? A gull? No, it’s not feathers, it’s skin…old skin…it’s an old man’s bum, lifting, about to roll over...

“Holy shit,” I gasp, dropping my binoculars, standing up.

Mom, I blurt, I gotta go. My mom’s concerned, thinking maybe a bear, but I’m talking over her, ending the call before she can say goodbye.

I need to move. Now.

It’s not the nudity that’s distressing; it’s what the eyes belonging to the elderly genitalia I just saw in excruciating detail will think if they see me peering down from above. Plant hunter or peeping tom? The difference might be hard to explain.

But I’m only a few steps along the trail before I’m wishing I could share this story with Wilf. This would be one to rival the many he told me.

But I can’t.

I’ve known this moment would come. When the phone rang several years ago, I drove over the mountains in a rush, afraid I would be too late. I was not the only one. During his final days in hospice, students from across North America came to stand beside Wilf’s bedside. It was all too easy, with him already gaunt and skeletal, to wonder how our botany would survive his absence.

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I’m on my hands and knees again, feeling pressured, the sun now masked behind gathering clouds. This trail seems like perfect habitat, but no sign of Crossidium. A little further, I think. Nope…nope…nope. I’ve only ever found Crossidium seriatum on my own once before. Why did I agree to this survey? Surely, I have better things to do than crawl on hands and knees above a beach occupied by naked men. Nope…nope… nope…frustration wells. Nope…wait. There? I grab for my squirt bottle, exploding artificial rain on tiny architecture.

I reach out and pluck the dripping scrap of crust. Beneath my hand lens, the crust swells. Is that it? I look up, world zooming out, twist the crust around to get a different angle and look down, zooming back in. My world resolves into microtopography, complete with gullies and peaks, canopied to one side by taller mosses. I scan right, sliding over an exposed plain of watery silt and then, there, half-buried in a gully, a silvery whip of white. Crossidium seriatium. I look up, twist, look down. Yup. Glee burbles up but I abruptly tamp it down. Not yet.

I slide the tiny sliver of crust into a brown paper bag. In black ink, I write Crosser(?), Naramata Rd, 3 Mi Pt; fold the bag in three; and place it at the top of my pack. I GPS my location, write a habitat description in my field book, noting the recreational trail within the cliffs. Standing up, I search the rest of the silt face. Yup, there, and maybe there, too. I won’t know for sure until I can get it under a microscope. But I think I’ve got it.

I can go. As I pick up my backpack, triumph wells up, spilling over. I know better than to tempt the gods. But it’s hard. I’m awash in the same joy I saw so often in Wilf’s eyes.

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Specimen stowed in my backpack, I walk back the way I came, thinking about the relationship between collectors and the land from which they collect. It was on a spring day not unlike today, that David Douglas, en route from Fort Vancouver to Fort Simpson, botanized along the long ribbon of this lake. He, like me, would have used Linnaean taxonomy—a grammar foreign to this valley—to name the specimens he collected. By privileging communication across time and space, the grammar he used left little space for the local or the Indigenous. David Douglas and Alexander von Humboldt botanized opposite ends of the New World, nearly thirty years apart. But both had their mosses identified by William J. Hooker, the eventual director of the Kew Botanical Gardens and a man who never set foot in this valley. More than one hundred years later, Wilf used the same language to share the specimens he collected with museums around the world.

I’ve long understood the benefits of Linnaean taxonomy; I’ve only begun to understand its limitations. It’s not that the specimen I found doesn’t matter. It does. Labelled and deposited in the same herbarium that holds Wilf’s collection, this specimen will help delineate the home of an endangered species. But today, my worry about the very real horror of Empire that haunts botany’s nomenclature is matched by my worry about botany’s marginalization within our society.

In the 21st century, the general public’s experience with native plants is nearly as endangered as Crossidium seriatum. A hundred years ago when plant collecting was considered recreation, in this valley there would have been men, women too, who would have recognized my collecting gear; some who regularly sent their own specimens to provincial botanist John Davidson. And before European settlement? I don’t know if Jeannette Armstrong’s ancestors would have called Crossidium seriatum by name, but I don’t doubt that their everyday intimacy with plants far outstripped mine.

In today’s globalized world, when avocados and lettuce from Mexico comprise more of our daily menu than native berries, does it matter if we know what counts as being home for a moss, rare or not? I think it does. Imagining another species’ home is like climbing a mountain; the real goal is not the summit, but the map we make en route. For it is within the moments of uncertainty, of figuring—here, not there; on this slope, not that one—that we taste the world’s silt and sand and blood, that we allow the world to imprint upon us. On this, the historians are clear: few plant collectors return unchanged.

I’m nearly at my car. I dread the next few hours—the long, slow drive north through a valley congested with townhouses and shopping malls. As a species, we humans are many things, but rare we are not. Maybe, I think, if we let more species imprint upon us, we might moderate the imprint we make on others.

I dig out the specimen I’ve collected from my backpack. In my hand, it feels less like a specimen and more like a thread of hope. Just for a moment, I try to imagine a map of home that could name without claiming, that could reconcile data with experience, Indigenous with settler. Like all maps, it’d be flawed—an incomplete, inadequate, and imperfect rendering—but I think Wilf would lean forward to look.

Lyn Baldwin teaches ecology at Thompson Rivers University amidst the sagebrush steppe and inland coniferous forests of southern British Columbia. Lyn’s illustrations and essays have been published in Camas, Cirque, Terrain and The Goose. More excerpts from Lyn’s field journals can be found at http://viridianlife.sites.tru.ca/

Process Note: Nearly all my creative writing begins in the field—most often in the pages of my illustrated field journals. It is when I am outside, paying close attention to the land and its inhabitants, that I stumble upon questions (What turns country into home?) worth answering. I return with images and sentence fragments that can take months or even years to ferment into something worth sharing. “Mapping Moss” began with my search for a rare moss, but I only found the essay’s through-line when I found David Douglas’ hand-drawn maps of the area I had searched. Empire, conservation—this essay is my attempt to acknowledge how the profession I call my own has served both.