“In Contemplation of a Simple Moss”: Bryophytes, Piousness, and Resurrection in Colonial Botany

Writing from the Amazon rainforest in June 1857, botanist Richard Spruce found himself in “the most mossy place [he] had ever yet seen anywhere.”¹ Plagued by a deep depression, exhaustion, and the recurrence of illness during his 15-year expedition, he suddenly found himself surrounded by his beloved, diminutive plants, and their presence felt like a blessing. In a region typically characterized—at  least for Victorian readers—by charismatic palm trees, vividly colored blooms, and economically valuable plants that captivated colonial collectors in the nineteenth century, Spruce “found reason to thank heaven which had enabled me to forget for the moment all my troubles in the contemplation of a simple moss.”² Coming across bryophytes renewed Spruce, not just through a sense of nostalgia for his home in Yorkshire or the promise of profitable plants that would secure him funding, but through the beauty of God’s creations, as palpable in a sensorially overwhelming rainforest as in the cobblestones of England. Although he is typically remembered for his adventuresome act of botanical espionage in transporting highly valuable cinchona saplings (carefully wrapped in moss) out of the Andes, Spruce maintained his focus on bryophytes throughout his Amazon expedition and beyond, largely forsaking economic botany in favor of mosses and liverworts.³ And indeed, Spruce was able to keep going on his expedition.⁴ 

Spruce was not alone in his rededication to his mossy obsession. While few other colonial botanists wrote so explicitly and at such length about bryophytes in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those who did held the tiny plants in high regard, often viewing them as proof of God’s design, as they embraced apparent simplicity of form over showiness. 

Indeed, mosses occupied an odd place in botany: awkwardly lumped into the twenty-fourth category of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, bryophytes and other spore-reproducing organisms ranging from slime molds to tree ferns became categorized as Cryptogamia—plants that reproduced (or “married”) secretly.⁵ Studies of cryptogams varied from the deeply scientific to pious, artistic “women’s work” exemplified by beautifully arranged pressed albums, which sometimes eschewed taxonomy in favor of teaching religious lessons through aestheticized natural history.⁶ Falling within the realm of “scientific” work, Spruce’s studies were formed largely in the field over long periods of time, but were nevertheless entangled in shifting political, religious, and scientific ideologies over the course of the century.

In this chapter, I will not attempt to recount the entire history of late-eighteenth and nineteenth century bryophytic practice.⁷ Rather, I’ll focus on a handful of moments of mossy contemplation in times of turmoil for colonial botanists, and explore how one of the world’s most common plants, found globally in a wide range of environments, was used as a kind of devotional object in shaping the art and science of close observation while also offering inspiration for both spiritual and bodily resurrection. Finding strength through the divine—defined and articulated differently for these naturalists working in an era of religious tumult in Britain and beyond—offered relief in continuing colonial missions, but ultimately manifested in grasping attempts at scientific order: plants culled, dried, affixed to paper, numbered and recorded, and removed from their homes to be sent back to the herbarium for filing. If moss was viewed within Anglican and Presbyterian traditions as pious because of its small, simple form and its reproductive morphology, confining it to paper for scientific study seems an odd turn—however, it also seems indicative of the tensions that defined this period of collecting. Resurrection, in these contexts, worked across multiple scales and definitions.

Another colonial explorer “saved” by a mossy encounter while traveling in the field was Scottish naturalist Mungo Park. Working in the 1790s under the African Association and widely credited for beginning in earnest the violent “age of African exploration,” Park found himself in West Africa, like Spruce in the Amazon, broken down, physically and mentally.⁸ Claiming to be “in the midst of a vast wilderness,” Park wrote, 

[I]n the depth of the rainy season, naked and alone, surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage . . . I was indeed a stranger in a strange land, yet I was still under the protective eye of that Providence who has condescended to call himself the stranger’s friend. At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss, in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye. I mention this to show from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation; for though the whole plant was no larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsules, without admiration.⁹

Remembering his training, he collected this moss—a new specimen of Fissidens—and shipped it back to the herbarium, transforming his object of divine inspiration into a specimen that was declared an invaluable holotype and is still used to this day for taxonomic study.¹⁰ Park, in this act of collection, firmly separated the botanical element of this encounter from what he considered to be an inspirational, providential intervention; indeed, this passage was quoted ad nauseum in religious commentary texts and adventure stories alike throughout the nineteenth century.

That Park and Spruce would react in such a similar way, despite their denominational differences, to a mossy encounter in the field was no coincidence. Cryptogams wove their way through literary and religious texts in both Anglican and Presbyterian traditions, ranging from the devoutly scriptural to the increasingly freethinking beliefs that occupied later-nineteenth century ideologies. The two men were raised in disparate households—Spruce’s working-class relationship to the Church of England was quite distant and developed into a sort of cautious agnosticism by the end of his life, while the much wealthier Park, originally destined for the ministry in the Church of Scotland, maintained his devotion. Yet both would have been familiar with the sweepingly pious, symbolic language used to describe the natural world.¹¹ Widely available and open to most for study, mosses in particular served as a way of cutting one’s teeth in microscopic illustration while proving one’s taxonomic skill and worth to naturalists with connections. 

By the early nineteenth century, a new ideological framework emerged in professionalized, specialized botany that was exemplified by prominent naturalists like James Edward Smith, William Jackson Hooker, and William Mitten. Charged with forming colonial desiderata and driving botanical taxonomy and theorization, these men likewise set their sights on cryptogamic plants, even though their flashier contributions to economic botany have received more historical attention. Biographized for their work in establishing and managing botanical gardens and scientific societies that drove the expansion of empire, they nevertheless named and described countless “new” species of bryophytes at home and abroad, defining an entire field while forming the foundations of cryptogamic herbaria in the global north.¹² But they also sought out and brokered deals in smaller plants collected by men like Spruce and Park that spoke to developing ideas—sometimes steeped in various strands of Christianity, sometimes directly challenging it—about biogeography, evolution, and reproduction, all of which could be observed, carefully and slowly, in the world’s vast expression of mosses. 

Moss conjured ideas of resurrection and piety not just because of its diminutive form, but because of its confounding morphology. Botanists found that bryophytes seemingly sprung up “invisibly” even in inhospitable environments, launching a series of experiments in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into the phylum’s microscopic mechanisms for sexual and asexual reproduction. Furthermore, these same mosses sometimes “came back to life” after long periods of apparent death or dormancy, challenging ideas of the beginnings and endings of life. Botanists like Johannes Hedwig experimented with cryptogamic dissection at the Leipzig Botanical Garden, studying bryophytes’ tiny sex organs using jewelers’ tools, while others like James Lindsay puzzled over how mosses sowed their spores at the Jamaica Botanic Garden.¹³ The humidity of Jamaica’s environment produced growth from seemingly dead cryptogams within just a fortnight, even when “impregnation” did not visibly occur, as Lindsay pointed out. Working from hot and dry Swan River Colony in Australia in the 1820s, Scottish botanist James Drummond similarly marveled over apparently dead Funaria mosses’ ability to “return . . . to the charge with every shower of rain,” proving his earlier experiments about such curious germination correct while viewing in the field what he had first observed under glass.¹⁴ Launching a flurry of investigations into this moisture-driven generation, by the early nineteenth century, mosses and other cryptogams were used to debate the very nature of life and its development.¹⁵

The idea that life could exist out of dried, ground up “dust,” out of seemingly inert soil, or out of visibly dead specimens confined to the herbarium was foundational to the complex theories about vitalism that occupied imaginations in natural history. These humble mosses became embroiled in conversations about what constituted the nature of life in ways that rippled far beyond botany. Resurrection was, for some, literal and scriptural, while for others, it was purely symbolic—a term borrowed from Christianity but diffused into secular, scientific views of the world. Working in the field and navigating a multiplicity of cosmologies and spiritual beliefs, often corresponding at a lag with colleagues at home more deeply entrenched in the heated religious and scientific debates of the day, collectors formed their own complex relationships with piety and the natural world based on their daily experiences.¹⁶ For many bryologists, the strange, mossy qualities that set bryophytes apart informed existential questions about their own bodies, minds, and motivations in ways that continue to inform conversations about what it might mean to think with plants and fungi today.

Years after returning home from his expedition through South America, Spruce contemplated the meaning of his miniscule subjects in a wildly different setting. Suffering from headaches and blurred vision that limited his microscopic study, the botanist reflected on the nature of his work. “I like to look upon plants as sentient beings,” he wrote, his typically neat handwriting shaking as his illness and pain worsened,

which live and enjoy their lives—which beautify the earth during life, and after death may adorn my herbarium. When they are beaten to pulp or powder in the apothecary’s mortar they lose most of their interest for me . . . but if man cannot torture them to his uses or abuses, they are infinitely useful where God has placed them, as I hope to live and show; and they are, at the least, useful to, and beautiful in, themselves—surely the primary motive for every individual existence.

His own “resurrection” as a highly regarded botanist after his death—his Amazonian collections are considered some of the finest in the world—obscures the struggles Spruce endured throughout his lifetime, in contrast to more sensationalized naturalists like Park, who better marketed their work while leaning into religious narratives.¹⁷ Bound up in questions of the “motive for every individual existence” uneasily defined between science and religion, bryophytic work in the field was necessarily built in an extractive, colonizing, Christian tradition, even as botanists’ own spiritual beliefs and drives faltered and shifted. While these mosses were resurrective for these collectors themselves as they traveled, bryophytes’ viridescent bodies were removed from their environments and filed in herbaria. Many of these plants do indeed possess the reproductive bodies necessary for literal resurrection, given the right circumstances, a drop or two of water, and a bit of luck. Instead, they sit inside of sterile metal shelving, awaiting study by future scholars within the colonial definitions that taxonomic botany has operated under in an effort to separate itself from religion. Thinking about the definitions, redefinitions, and instabilities of colonial botany across scales and settings and between theory and practice can perhaps offer lessons on our own contemplations about our existences and motives in working with natural historical collections and remind us that the tensions within this field are, after all, far from new.

¹ Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, vol. 2, ed. Alfred Russel Wallace (MacMillan & Co., 1908), 140. [Return to Section]

² The evening after he wrote this, Spruce and his collecting party waited out heavy rains in a convent built years before by a missionary; while the local people had “long ago renounced Christianity and the church ha[d] fallen to decay,” they found safety there. His guides and porters refused to continue on unless they lightened their load, and Spruce accordingly limited his collections to mosses and got rid of his paper, noting that “the savages made a bonfire of my precious drying-paper and danced around it!” Spruce, Notes of a Botanist, vol. 2, 141–3. [Return to Section]

³ For one sensationalized account of this adventure, see John Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates, and Spruce in the Amazon (Thames & Hudson, 2015). Spruce’s feat was exceptionally important (and dangerous): cinchona was remarkably valuable in facilitating long-term settler colonialism because its bark was used to make the antimalarial drug quinine, but in the mid-19^th century, the plant was largely under Spanish colonial monopoly and had not been successfully transported long-distance. For more on the history of cinchona, see Matthew James Crawford, The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine, and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909 (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Kavita Philip, “Imperial Science Rescues a Tree: Global Botanic Networks, Local Knowledge and the Transcontinental Transplantation of Cinchona,” Environment and History 1.2 (1995): 173–200; and Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). [Return to Section]

⁴ Most of Spruce’s herbarium specimens are now held at the New York Botanical Garden or split between the Natural History Museum London (bryophytes) and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (all other plants). [Return to Section]

⁵ The most systematic and comprehensive version of Linnaeus’s categorization of cryptogams is found in Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, vol. 2 (Haak, 1735). For more on cryptogams as a category, see Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and Robert Mitchell, “Cryptogamia,” European Romantic Review 21.5 (2010): 631–651. [Return to Section]

⁶ See, for instance, a British album of 48 botanical specimens produced by an anonymous woman circa 1850 in Specimens of Cryptogamia, Filicales, Musci, circa 1850 (Yale Center for British Art rare Books and Manuscripts, 1850), QK513.S64 1850+. Each recto page features ferns, mosses, and other cryptogams thoughtfully arranged and labeled into wreaths or bouquets; they’re accompanied on the verso by Biblical and poetic verses and parables about the beauty and providence of God’s creations through its smallest and most common inhabitants. [Return to Section]

⁷ For more on bryology in colonial history, see my forthcoming book, Moss: A Cultural History, and my essay “Moss as Medium: Colonial Plant Transportation and the Materiality of Movement,” in  Plants in Translation: Global Diasporas and Local Entanglements in Historical Context, eds. Geoff Bil, Tamara Caulkins, and Kathleen Gutierrez (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming); for an excellent scientific and cultural introduction to bryophytes, see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003). [Return to Section]

⁸ For another sensationalist account of this expedition—contributing to a field of popular historical literature that ignores the specificities and violences of colonial expeditions in favor of “great men” stories mired in competition and discovery, see: Frank T. Kryza, The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold (Harper Collins, 2006). [Return to Section]

⁹ Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, Performed Under the Direction and Patronage of the African Association (W. Bulmer & Co., 1799), 244. [Return to Section]

¹⁰ The type specimen and duplicates of Park’s specimens collected during this encounter can be found at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the New York Botanical Garden, where they were transferred as part of bryologist William Mitten’s herbarium in 1904. See: Fissidens parkii Mitt. [isotype], Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, E00319385; and Fissidens parkii Mitt. [holotype], New York Botanical Garden, NY01020297. [Return to Section]

¹¹ The anonymous woman working circa 1850, for instance, transcribed passages including: “There’s Beauty all around our paths / If but our watchful eyes / Can trace its most familiar things, / And through their lowly guide / We may find it where a Fern or Moss, / Adorns the common way / Or where a hedge rose showers / Its blossoms from the spray.” A vast number of books deal with the history of religion and natural history in the nineteenth century, including women and working-class men’s complicated and uneven role in botanical practice. See, for example, David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Penguin, 1976); Mary Ellen Bellanca, Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870 (University of Virginia Press, 2007); Richard Bellon, A Sincere and Teachable Heart: Self-Denying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736–1859 (Brill, 2015); Ann Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire,” History of Science 32 (1994): 269–315 and “Corresponding Interests: Artisans and Gentlemen in Nineteenth-Century Natural History,” British Journal for the History of Science 27.4 (1994): 383–408; Brad Scott, “A Family Moss Craze: Learning, Reading, and Skill Development in a Botanic and Domestic Network in Early Nineteenth-Century England and Wales,” British Journal for the History of Science (2025): 1–17; and Ann Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1999). [Return to Section]

¹² Botanical collections at sites like the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Linnean Society certainly valued “vegetable products” like cinchona, rubber, and tea, all of which fueled long-term settler colonialism, and sought out beautiful, rare “exotics” like fruits and flowers that drew in visitors. But Hooker, for example, consulted on a rare moss with Smith before leaving for an expedition to Iceland, where he studied and collected bryophytes like Fissidens, Hypnum, and Jungermannia, and published or co-authored dozens of books on cryptogams throughout his lifetime. Despite never leaving his home in Sussex, Mitten described thousands of species of bryophytes sent to him from almost every continent over the course of the nineteenth century. See, for example, James Edward Smith, “Characters of Hookeria, a New Genus of Mosses, with Descriptions of Ten Species,” Transactions of the Linnean Society 9 (1808): 272–282; William Jackson Hooker, British Jungermanniae (Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orne & Brown, 1816) and Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809 (Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1811); and William Mitten, Musci Austro-Americani (Taylor & Francis, 1869) and “Musci Indiae Orientalis,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, Botany 1 (1859). [Return to Section]

¹³ Johann Hedwig, Theoria Generationis et Fructionis Plantarum Cryptogamica Linnaei (Breitkopfio-Haerteliana, 1798) and Species Muscorum Frondosorum: Descriptae et tabulis aeneis lxxvii coloratis illustratae (A. Koenig, 1801). Gardener John Lindsay and his assistant, a Dr. Clarke, experimented with “invisible seeds” and “dust, or fine powder” from ferns, which had more easily visible spores and spore capsules, from Jamaica in a series of communications with the English naturalist Joseph Banks. John Lindsay to Joseph Banks, “Account of the Germination and Raising of Ferns from the Seed,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 2 (1794): 93. [Return to Section]

¹⁴ James Drummond, “Extracts from Various Letters from Mr. James Drummond, Relating to the Botany of Swan River (Cont.),” Hooker’s Journal of Botany, ed. William Jackson Hooker 5 (1853): 401–2. Drummond published his experiments on mosses in “Observations on the Germination of Mosses, in a Letter to W.J. Hooker, 2 March 1819,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, vol. 13 (R. Taylor, 1822), 24. This type of germination supported Drummond’s biogeographical theories about plant distribution around the globe amid changing ideas about the age and formation of the earth. [Return to Section]

¹⁵ For more on debates about spontaneous generation, much of which was centered around “simple” organisms like mosses, molds, yeasts, and even worms, see John Farley, Gametes and Spore: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction, 1750-1914 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); James Strick, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates Over Spontaneous Generation (Harvard University Press, 2000); and Jessica Riskin, The Power of Life: The Radical Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin Random House, 2026). [Return to Section]

¹⁶ Spruce corresponded with and ran in the same circles as many of the naturalists who theorized and published about evolution by natural selection, including, most significantly, Alfred Russel Wallace. While he never formally renounced Christianity and seemed to have believed interrogations into evolution supported “Supreme Intelligence,” Spruce did write—although sparingly—about his acceptance of evolution by natural selection, even using the term “survival of the fittest,” based on his observations in the field, using species of Hypnum moss and other plants as examples. For full reprints and interpretations of two of his most explicit acknowledgments of evolution, see Richard Evans Schultes, “An Unpublished Letter by Richard Spruce on the Theory of Evolution,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 10 (1978): 159–161 and “Still Another Unpublished Letter from Richard Spruce on Evolution,” Rhodora 89 (1987): 101–106. Interestingly, Wallace—who traveled through the Amazon alongside Spruce for part of his expedition, edited Spruce’s published volumes, and co-discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin—revised his theory in 1871 to account for a particularly strange version of resurrection: spiritualism. He published his belief in continued evolution within the spirit realm after death, expressed through seances, in Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (G. Redway, 1896), as well as in a number of letters (including to Darwin) and shorter papers. [Return to Section]

¹⁷ Spruce’s work was celebrated posthumously first by Wallace, but perhaps more significantly by the twentieth century Harvard-based botanist Richard Evans Schultes—the so-called father of ethnobotany—who retraced much of Spruce’s expedition, idolized him in many ways, and wrote frequently about his ethnobotanical work. For more on Schultes’s work with hallucinogenic plants that Spruce had studied during the nineteenth century, see Merlin Sheldrake, “The ‘Enigma’ of Richard Schultes, Amazonian Hallucinogenic Plants, and the Limits of Ethnobotany,” Social Studies of Science 50.3 (2020): 345–376. [Return to Section]

Ayers, Elaine. "'In Contemplation of a Simple Moss': Bryophytes, Piousness, and Resurrection in Colonial Botany" in Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World, edited by Rachael Petersen, Russell Powell, and Natalia Scott Schwein. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026. https://doi.org/10.70423/0003.08