Dan Piepenbring:
"Richard Spruce, a nineteenth-century biologist, was obsessed not with spruces or even conifers at large, but with mosses, liverworts, bryophytes: the true underdogs of the plant world. Most scientists of his kind found them boring, but mosses had an active life in other quarters of the Victorian imagination"
Elaine Ayers:
"... realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. One need only look to the climax of Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent historical novel, The Signature of All Things — a long-coming sexual awakening that takes place in a hidden moss-covered grotto in Tahiti — as evidence for the strength and longevity of this Victorian plot device..."
Artist: Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, 1904
"Richard Spruce, a nineteenth-century biologist, was obsessed not with spruces or even conifers at large, but with mosses, liverworts, bryophytes: the true underdogs of the plant world. Most scientists of his kind found them boring, but mosses had an active life in other quarters of the Victorian imagination"
Elaine Ayers:
"... realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. One need only look to the climax of Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent historical novel, The Signature of All Things — a long-coming sexual awakening that takes place in a hidden moss-covered grotto in Tahiti — as evidence for the strength and longevity of this Victorian plot device..."
Artist: Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, 1904
Brigitte Bardot, notice the moss around her
courtesy: FB page
