Mosses on The Colbert Report

I saw an episode of the Colbert Report last night and moss landscaping/gardening was featured in one of the jokes. You know that things are becoming more popular when they reach the late night comedy shows.

In part of the sketch he mentions turning a backyard koi pond into a peat bog. This statement is actually not impossible. Sphagnum sp. (peat moss) has the ability to change the acidity (pH) of the water in which it lives. It makes the water more acidic, which is better for the moss and usually worse for many of the other plants. Colbert did forget to mention that turning a koi pond into a bog will probably also kill all the koi.

If you are interested in cutting directly to the mossy reference it starts around 3:50min.

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Mosses on TV

I was watching television yesterday after dinner with my family and saw a program featuring mosses. Okay, maybe featuring is a bit of an exaggeration, but mosses were mentioned a couple of times and how often do you see mosses on TV anyway. Needless to say, I was pretty excited!

The show that we watched was on PBS entitled Playing with Trains in the Garden. The segment featured Paul Busse who is a landscape architect using natural materials to build public garden exhibits that feature replicas of local buildings and miniature working trains. The show went behind the scenes to his workshop in Kentucky where the displays are built. They showed how the raw materials, such as moss, are collected from the forest and then assembled by his team to make the displays. It is quite the process and his team is made up of really great artisans! They used the moss to fill in any cracks or chinks in the buildings. One artisan had a great line about moss, (paraphrased, I am not good at direct quotes from memory.) 'Mosses fill up all the little spaces and hide the blemishes. I wish that I could use moss in all areas of my life.' That was the best moss comment the entire show and a nice sentiment as well.

I also looked around online to find a video of Busse's displays. There are several videos on his company's website, Applied Imagination and many photographs of the displays that they have made. I also found a video on YouTube entitled Busse's Enchanted Express by Randy Walk at the Columbus Dispatch. It is a really nice video and features the display at the Franklin Park Conservatory. The version from YouTube is posted below the fold.