Sphagnum on the Houston bog.

Soft mats on wet ground. Windfall for the tin. A plant of place.

Quick guide to

SPHAGNUM

★ in Alaska ★

Soft mats on wet ground. Windfall for the tin. A plant of place.

Fact	On this place
Latin	Sphagnum spp.
Where it stands	Houston bog / wet peat ground
How you know it	Soft pale cushions; star-headed moss mats; holds water
When we work it	Windfall and careful take; leave the living mat
What we take	Loose windfall only — no tearing the living carpet
In the shop	Sphagnum Salve (when SKU live) — hands that work the land
Who else uses it	The bog

Sphagnum moss on a Houston bog in gold light — **Sphagnum**The bog and the hands

Sphagnum holds the wet places around Houston the way spruce holds the ridges. Soft, pale, thirsty. In a dry summer it still sits in the bog after rain.

People have known bog moss for a long time as a plant of wet ground. In the Great War it left the bog and entered the medical record as a surgical dressing. Soldiers and surgeons called it surgical moss. Charles W. Cathcart wrote on preparing sphagnum dressings in The Lancet (1916). J. W. Hotson surveyed sphagnum as a surgical dressing in Science (1918). That story belongs to the plant and the century, not to a tin on a table.

—

Here in Houston the same genus grows in the bog. Windfall we can gather without tearing the living mat. Pressed in sweet almond oil and set with beeswax, Sphagnum Salve is a simple pour for hands that work the land. Warm a little and put it on. Ordinary oil, wax, and moss from home ground.

See the shop

Back to Field Notes