Plantlore Pics

Lit Alutiiq lamp with sphagnum moss wick

The last few months I have been helping to edit and publish a book about Alutiiq plantlore.  My main job has been to edit and find images to illustrate the volume.  The best part of this process has been taking new photographs.  Back in February I did another blog post on this topic (click here), but I thought I'd do another post to show off some of the more recent pictures.

A couple of days ago I took the top photo of Rebecca holding a lit lamp.  The purpose of the picture was to demonstrate the burning wick made of sphagnum moss.  I'd always thought the Alutiiq mostly used cotton grass for wicks.  But the Alutiiq sources had specified sphagnum moss.  It was hard to shape the moss into a wick and I was a little skeptical that it would work very well.

So Rebecca and I set up the shoot and lit the lamp.  And the sphagnum moss wick worked amazingly well!  It lit quickly and burned brightly - far better than any wick we had previously used.  I was sold, and I also had learned something new from the book.

Patrick

Berry picker and masher

Gayla's Kelp Pickles

Frozen blueberries - mmmmmm

Sphagnum moss