Mosses

Terrarium plants - Mosses - Let your terrarium go green!

Hardly any other plant type creates such an atmosphere of wildness and freshness as mosses. They cover the ground, trees and rocks with soft cushions, mats and hanging curtains and fascinate with their many shades of green and delicate structures.

"Mosses" - these are the true mosses, liverworts and hornworts, three separate groups that nevertheless have a lot in common. There are also "everlasting" fern prothalli that are very reminiscent of certain liverworts.

Mosses are most conspicuous and diverse in rainy, foggy and rather cool regions such as tropical montane cloud forests and temperate rainforests. But mosses also occur in arid regions, even in deserts, because as so-called poikilohydric plants they can dry out completely and revive when moistened, even after a long time. Mosses have no roots, only rhizoids, hair-like anchoring organs. They absorb water and nutrients over their entire surface. Mosses can hardly store water, even though moss cushions can soak up water like a sponge and hold it for a while.

Today there are far more aquarium mosses than terrestrial mosses kept in terrariums. However, most aquarium mosses can grow not only underwater but also above water if there is enough moisture. They often come from places such as stones and wood in the flood and splash zones of streams and waterfalls. Only a few species such as Fissidens fontanus and Fontinalis species are purely aquatic mosses. That's why we also offer aquarium mosses such as Taxiphyllum and Vesicularia species, Leptodictyum riparium or Plagiomnium cf. affine for planting terrariums.

"Cushion moss" is also available as terrarium decoration. It is the white moss (Leucobryum glaucum), which also grows in acidic forests in our latitudes. In terrariums, it lasts a long time at least.