I started viewing handfuls of healthy soil, forest or otherwise, with new respect when I learned of their teeming life forms.  That awareness has now extended to including rotting old tree trunks and stumps, smothered with moss and lichen and countless invisible organisms.

I cheer inwardly when I see a new patch of moss or a wild flower spreading this year beyond last year’s bloom-room. And my most used app allows me to take pictures of wild flowers which it then identifies (Seek by iNaturalist, in case you’re wondering).

‘There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.’

Source: Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (London: William Collins, 2017), p. 86

Photo credit: Stocksnap at pixabay