Soil.

Not soil.

9 years, nothing growing yet.

Soil

Not soil.

Nothing even germinates here.

Soil.

You find soil where water pools. (Rocks, too.)

It is life — a gravitational effect that manifests itself at boundaries.

Mineral earth is just mineral earth. A good place for bees to burrow.

Very small bees.

Plants prefer even rocks over that stuff.

The life that grows in mineral earth is growing in the soil within the earth, not the earth.

Plants, after all, came from the sea. They know about stuff like this. Gravity pools, a form of dry land tidal pool, help. Below is a pool of green water in a deer’s footprint (centre left).

Here’s a gravity pool collecting rain within a stone.

Here’s one flowing, as water will.

Plants root in life like this. Dirt is just an environment of ground up mountains that allows soil, a kind of living weather, to form, if the conditions are right.