Sy Montgomery - The Wild Out Your Window

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I hey bask in frigid snowmelt like a sunbather soaks up sun on a beach. Before the ferns uncoil, before the tree-buds burst, before the jack-in-the-pulpit thrusts its way through the ice, these humble, tiny plants glow green.

Meek creatures, as the 18th-century British art critic John Ruskin called them, the first mercy of the earth, mosses prove again the prophesy that the meek shall inherit the earth, for at the first stroke of spring, the world is theirs. Spring quickens first in the mosses.

Yet those of us who dont know better pass by these lovely plants. Mosses are small and tend to grow in humble places, between the cracks in sidewalks, in the crevices of tree bark, on the underside of rocks. People dont see them, laments Benito Tan, a Harvard Herbarium researcher who monitors the worlds endangered mosses.

Tan admits that he, too, overlooked the mosses at first. As a young botanist in the Philippines, he studied the showier ferns and fern allies, lugging a heavy plant press on his collecting expeditions and returning further weighted down with specimens. An opportunity to study mosses in Canada offered an epiphany: I quickly found that if I go collecting, I come back with only a small bag. The specimens are so light!

The mosses miniature charms won him over. Tan also teaches evening classes for the Arnold Arboretum and New England Wild Flower Society on identifying New England mosses. His message: Although theyre small, theyre so beautiful.

A l0x magnifying lens will help you appreciate the lilliputian world of the mosses. Their fanciful common names suggest their staggering variety of form: The humpbacked elves, greenish-black mosses that look like mushrooms; knights plume, whose light yellow-green feather-like leaves clothe decaying logs; the torn veil mosses of waterfalls; the common hairy cap, the most common moss of Boston woods, named for the hairy, hood-like veil that covers its spore case. It grows in beds that may stretch a hundred feet across.