Having recently watched the BBC documentary ‘Secrets in the Peat’, and now that the engineering works and fabrication of the gravity-fed Ilkley Fountain are well under way, I have tried to note down why I am intrigued by Sphagnum Moss, and why it felt so right as the inspiration for the sculpture.
Sphagnum Moss was one of the first land plants, appearing on the earth more than 350 million years ago. Archaeologists think that there was a widespread belief in the Iron Age that bog habitats, formed by layers of Sphagnum, were sacred places. Close to the skies and with undefined edges, the soft peaty ground has an in-between feel, and the open, liminal spaces are expansive and play with our sense of scale.
Only one in 20 cells in a Sphagnum plant is alive. The rest are dead but still integral to the plant’s success, filled with up to 20 times their weight in water. This lack of decomposition once the plant has died forges a mysterious sense of the past and of deep time in the constantly and slowly forming peat: it feels as if the ground is literally made of preserved memories, ghosts and secrets. Yet simultaneously the habitat of an acidic, water-logged sphagnum bog teems with irrepressible life: from heathers, bilberries and sundews to dragonflies, birds and butterflies.
The way Sphagnum looks is mystifying. The small tufty part visible at the top is all that we are able to see, and although swollen with water, seems to float weightlessly. Yet underneath the ground, the long, lower layers are gradually sinking further and further and compressing into peat. The simultaneous sense of lightness and weight feels akin to a musical echo, a fleeting note with sonorous reverberation.
I have only in the past few years learned about Sphagnum, and it is a plant which has an elusive, shape-shifting quality; neither fully alive nor dead, with a constantly changing sense of proportion, it is historically framed by our own relationship with this plant. Sphagnum Moss has long been well known and sought after for its healing capacities for wounds and for many years, peat was used as a fuel due to the carbon it holds. Now of course peatlands are recognised as the largest terrestrial carbon store: Whilst they only cover between three-four per cent of the world’s surface, they store in dead sphagnum plant matter a third of all soil carbon – twice as much as rainforests.
Whilst using our own human language to describe what we feel to be the characteristics of other living species is problematic, it is tempting. It seems that Sphagnum Moss is generous: it supports other life forms, lives in harmony with the species around it, has been used for healing for thousands of years and is crucial in mitigating the climate crisis. It seems that Sphagnum Moss is humble: it is such a small plant which, when it gradually grows into communities and carpets of moss, has immense potential to help create and maintain balance, clean the water, store carbon and create such incredibly beautiful and thriving habitats. It seems that Sphagnum Moss is peaceful: over millions of years, it hasn’t seemed to want to extend beyond its tiny size, nor to colonise other species around it. Words seem too limited and too recently constructed to describe something which is so ancient, so elemental and so vital. The fountain sculpture, based on the forms of Sphagnum and giving centre stage to the moorland water rushing down from Ilkley Moor, is an attempt to express that sense of awe and wonder.
