notes on being a SAM volunteer

I am a SAM volunteer now [started on Tuesday] and suggest it to anyone who wants to spread creativity, culture, and beauty in our fair city. I will be keeping museum information at White Sage to sign up, be informed, or donate - in addition to updating my experiences and thoughts here:

The most amazing [and unexpected] thing about being stationed at the Neukom Vivarium is that I get to learn about local plants! Come by and I will tell you more, but this is the first moss I have learned how to identify...ever.

Oregon Beaked Moss: Eurynchium oreganum

This moss is found in mats and is green to yellowish-green in colour. The stems are from 6 to 30 cm long but occasionally up to 45cm, the branches are regularly pinnate (a ‘herring bone’ pattern of branching) and between 1.3 and 2.5 cm in length. The main stems are generally not divided, although sometimes they have one large division. The broadly heart-shaped and sharply pointed leaves have distinctly toothed edges. The leaves are slightly pleated. The stem leaves have margins that extend below the line where they are attached at right angles. The operculum is pointed downwards and the beak curves upward. The stalk of the sporangium is 2 to 2.5 cm long, and the capsule is reddish brown.

A little more about the Vivarium:

"Neukom Vivarium is a hybrid work of sculpture, architecture, environmental education and horticulture that connects art and science. Sited at the corner of Elliott Avenue and Broad Street, it features a sixty-foot-long "nurse log" in an eighty-foot-long custom-designed greenhouse. Set on a slab under the glass roof of the greenhouse, the log has been removed from the forest ecosystem and now inhabits an art system. Its ongoing decay and renewal represent nature as a complex system of cycles and processes. Visitors observe life forms within the log using microscopes and magnifying glasses supplied in a cabinet designed by the artist. Illustrations of potential log inhabitants-bacteria, fungi, lichen, plants, and insects-decorate blue and white tiles that function as a field guide, assisting visitors' identification of "specimens." Neukom Vivarium is the artist's first permanent public art work in the United States."