Notes from a moss survey

We spent November on our knees in the Lake District, naming mosses that had colonized a collapsed retaining wall. The wall was a failure. The moss was a complete civilization.

The archive we built afterwards is not a garden. It is a set of rooms that try, and often fail, to reproduce the wall failures: the drip line, the north shade, the lime leach.

Visitors want a photograph. The moss wants to be left alone after rain. Our job is to disappoint the visitor just enough.