Moss art

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Pretty cool stuff.

Some folks do moss graffiti or writing

Others incorporate it into sculpture

Or homes

Here's a moss-covered car

Take a seat?

In moist rocky areas, moss, mildew and lichen growth can be encouraged by painting rock surfaces with nutrient rich food paste. I have done this accidentally when food waste got all over rocks surrounding a garden.

Yoghurt works a treat

I know someone who takes moss and uses a blender to make a "smoothie" with yogurt, then paints it onto flower pots and other things. This works quite well and surprisingly fast.

I have many mosses of many different shades of green and have long thought, but never gotten around to doing (damn those only 24 hours in a day), mixing up a palette of greens and using them to paint pictures, patterns etc. on rocks, green roofs or basically anywhere the imagination and conditions permit.

Our Happy Buddha grotto in early spring.

Mayor McTroll toll master at the ford in the stream.

Kota, your place is beautiful. I'm sure I've read where you are but I can't remember, please remind me.
I love moss, but it doesn't love me and my alkaline, sandy, dry, seaside place!

Leila, we're in southern Quebec, in the green mountains, just north of the Vermont border. This is really moss country, acid soil, shallow with weepy shale bedrock close to the surface. It is very beautiful, but maybe you should be happy that you cannot become addicted to the practice of tending to it. My partner spends about an hour a day mossing (weeding) it. He does it at the end of the day while I make supper. He finds it Zen, a physical form of meditation. I just took some new photos this weekend and I'll post them when I dump them from my camera.

As promised a few new photos. The colours at this time of year, cool weather and long sun, are breathtaking.

Also I'm trying out an image site to see if I can, and because I find the bigger pics look nicer in the thread. Fingers crossed.

Yay, half a dozen edits later and it works!!!

Japanese moss gardens are soooo pretty!

I like live walls too. http://www.greenovergrey.com/

I have seen really pretty pallet gardens too. Put them upright and you have a really cool living privacy fence.

http://www.designsponge.com/2011/09/diy-project-recycled-pallet-vertical-garden.html

big wall o moss art

(source)

before

after

(source)

Awww sweet!

We have loads of moss in the Pacific NW. Here's a pic of the Sol Duc River on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State taken by my cousin Mark. I caught a steelhead in that river once a few years back.

i love moss, never managed to get anything properly painted in places where it actually grows here, but i didnt use yogurt or anything either

Lots of nice images!
Kota- I envy you the rocks, though I know they can be a lot of work to deal with, I'm a rock gardener, so they idea of sheets of rock just sitting there are very appealing!

We are somewhere in the middle on moss- lots of it around here in wooded or shady places, even under grasses etc in open woods- but obviously less than places like the West Coast!

Love those huge sculptures shown in a couple of pics- I've seen (pics of) one like that that is on Prince Charles' property (might be one of those shared here?) and I believe the body of the sculpture was made with 'mud' (clay?) I'd love to do something like that

I'm thinking of ways to do in situ art in the forest, could be ephemeral, or something that grows ....

Hey Cohan I'm a rock gardener too, got them growing everywhere

The reason we have ledge showing there is because the big machines ripped off the soil when we built the dam. Watching nature try to re-colonize it since then has taught me a lot about how these systems work. The reason the moss does so well is that there is almost always water draining across it because the shale bedrock weeps.

You have the rock gardens growing everywhere, or just the rocks? lol

Interesting habitat with the always moist rock surfaces- you could grow some very cool plants on those- some saxifragas and primulas might like that, I bet Pinguicula and Drosera (carnivorous plants) would love it, and of course some ferns etc. A lot of alpine gardeners would kill for a spot like that..lol

Cohan, I meant the rocks are growing, or at least it seems like they are. Mostly I use them for building terraces since I'm on a mountain side.

I never thought of using Pinguicula, but we do have a native Drosera that gets to be about the size of a quarter. The primula do love it though. I've got P. denticulata and P. veras. 2 years ago we had to go to the niece's wedding an Vancouver, and whilst visiting the Van Deusen botanical gardens I picked up a package of their "candelabra" primula seeds. They were already a couple of years old and I didn't get a very good germination rate, about 6 in total. They should bloom for the first time this year; I'm looking forward to it.

In this area the other plants that do very well are lobilia cardinalis, meconopsis betonicifolia, iris ensata and all the wild volunteers. I'm sure the small stature of most alpines would get them overrun in my wet areas, but we do have crumbling shale outcroppings that we plant with sedums, saxifragas' and the like.

Sounds like some great habitat

A friend tried this, can't remember the exact measurements but she basically mixed up some moss, some buttermilk, water and sugar and painted it on the her garden wall. A toxic free alternative to graffitti

There's an article about this in this month's Permaculture Magazine.

Myself in front of a wall of moss before a short hike in Japan.