This technique will work for nearly every species of moss. Using this method you can make miniature scenes with "lawns", "bushes", "trees", and many other garden-y, foilage-y things with moss.

You will need many mosses, or just one or two types. Pillow moss/ mood moss /frog moss = Lawn or hills, Haircap moss, leucobrynum, other mosses = garden plants, and some tall species of moss can be used as "trees". You will also need tweezers of a comfortable size.. (If you are working in a jar make sure the tweezers can reach the spot you want to plant them in).



So, first step, once you clean your moss, is to seperate the pieces. For garden plants and trees you can seperate a single piece of moss per tweezer to plant them. For the lawn grass such as leucobryum and pillow moss you may want to plant bunches of them of 5 or so heads. Trim the "stem" of the moss to a size you can use.



(This photo is example with haircap moss)

Then, you can stick them in the soil..



And done

Beautiful! And I love your pictures, too!

Can you talk a bit about cleaning the moss?

joannakat said:Beautiful! And I love your pictures, too!

Can you talk a bit about cleaning the moss?

I find that cleaning moss is kinda dependent one what kind of moss.
If your moss is not from a seller and you find it in -- for example -- your backyard, you would rinse it for a while in water to wash off any bugs or dirt.

For other clumpings ones such as mood moss, haircap moss, catherine's moss, or leucobryum, if you don't want a hill, I would take it apart to 3 stems a bunch, trim off the dead leaves, and insert them into the soil with tweezers. You could wash them too, after you remove a bunch.

I seem to not have much trouble with bugs in my moss.

Cool!

Alex, can we see some photos of the scenes you've created?

Yes! I have a few in progress. I'll snap some photos later.

Looking forward to them! As with tropicals, moss isn't an easy play in this arid land, so I love looking at pictures!

Every time I've tried to cultivate moss, pillbugs eat it. I've never bothered to try to clean it because I was doing this outside. My 2nd mini garden started with a beautiful carpet of moss but it didn't last long. A container or vignette of just moss would qualify as a mini garden, IMVHO.

I do love moss though, sometimes it's the greenest green. I've always been one to stop and caress dense, smooth moss while hiking. There's some cool moss on a wall behind my office and it makes beautiful red stems when it "blooms." The only place I don't like it is on a patio or walkway, too slippery.

aww
I think pillbugs look pretty cute.
I have a few in a terrarium, they dont seem to bother the moss as long as they have something else to nibble on, like dead leaves for me.

They are cute! It's hard for me to get too mad @ them, just doing their thing - with the moss I moved from where it was doing well.

Under the dwarf acer palmatum there is a nice area of Irish moss , (Sagina subulata).also shown around stepping stones in bloom.

Moss is a perfect complement to Japanese maples. Lovely!

Here are some of the works in progress:









Here is selaginella proping so I can use it.

Adorable!

Alex, so artistic and beautiful! A real competitor of bonsai!

joannakat said:Alex, so artistic and beautiful! A real competitor of bonsai!

I agree. I like the simplicity of the second one. In the first, those can't be peeps...?!?

No, they are these tiny chick figurines. I don't know where they are from, I just found them in a random box in the basement. Peeps would be fun to work with..... "A Peep in a natural habitat"

The second one is a hedgehog with leucobryum glaucum. I think leucobryum glaucum looks nice in a carpet or a little mound..

I don't reccomend having figurines in mood moss, it is very tall-growing so in the end the figurines look like they are buried in tall, unmowed grass.

Very nice design and lovely to see moss used in mini form.

Moss projects are really easy. All one needs is a the dedication to keep them moist, but even then, when a planting does dry out (ala a vacation) it's not much of a set back because all that's needed to revive moss is a rededication to keeping it moist. As a bonsai practitioner with a couple of hundred plants, I'm doing the watering rounds daily anyway, so it's not much of a chore to see to a planting's moisture needs.

This (below) is part of a stump from a pear tree. After I cut the tree down, I piled brush on the stump and burned it before I dug it out. I put it in a plastic tray with some gritty mix in the bottom, and started to water it. Mother nature did all the rest, except for the 2 live plants you can see in the images, which were cuttings I had for no reason in particular. Below you'll see it in Aug of the first summer. There are a couple of featherstones in the mix too, but they are already covered by moss. The small plant with the Osmocote prills above it is a Ficus pumila. Not sure why I used it as I knew it wouldn't tolerate the winter. I guess just because it was handy.


Here, you see the featherstones before I added the stump:


Below is the back side of the first image. The other plant matter is liverwort, which rode in on the wind (I didn't plant it).


This is the same planting, a summer later, with the Ficus gone under and a bittersweet vine in it's place. The moss is making good progress insofar as covering the stump. I left the planting outdoors in a Michigan winter and the plant died from getting too dry (not the cold). Currently, the moss is a thick matt covering everything. Nuthatches love to hide sunflower seeds in the moss (which germinate and get pulled out with tweezers), and birds love stealing it for their nests, especially chickadees.


This and the next 2 images below are front/back of a little project consisting of about a 3x5x3" mini-loaf pan (dollar store) I drilled a bottom hole in, a branch elbow from a cedar tree on top of gritty mix, and a Ficus pumila cutting. The image was taken last year in Oct when I brought the planting in to grow under lights and controlled humidity.


This is the front view of the dish planting a little later in the winter, after the cutting was fully rooted and had grown a bit.

I keep them in the shade outdoors, and under 6000K LEDs indoors. All I do is spritz them with tapwater with a hose or hand spritzer twice per day unless it rains. I add a few drops of Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 from time to time, and that's about it.

You can make miniature moss gardens in large bottle caps or small food containers. I like to make a hole in the bottom, half-fill with a little potting mix, and nestle a pine cone, interesting piece of a branch or wood, or something else that supports moss growth, and wait until they look good and give them to all sorts of people I come across during my travels.

Sorry it looks drab. I just ran out to snap a picture. It's been out in our winter w/o water and I didn't clean up the lid from a container of DWs skin moisturizer (about 3" wide), but I hope you get the idea.

Al

Beautiful! Both the pictures and the explanation! Great contribution @tapla!