A while back, I made up some moss paint, and decorated my planter boxes on the fence with it, for added interest there, they being ordinary cedar boxes, weathering slowly.
For weeks and weeks there was no sign of anything! it dried, and seemed to have vanished. Then, in the last couple of days, signs of life. The moss appears to be starting to take hold.
Just a shadow now, but this means they are starting to grow. And that the torrential rains we've had since the painting was done didn't, as I feared, wash all the moss off to land on the ground.
So I took a couple of pix, and you see the irregular shapes I painted in. This sort of environment is better with more random markings than over-organized ones.
This being the case, I took out the rest of the paint from the freezer, thawed it and chucked it at the other fence, to form a freeform backdrop to the bare twigs of the yellow roses, anyway, that's the plan.
So now again, all I have to do is wait and see if it takes. Spectator art.
You can click on the label at the bottom of this post, if I've done it right, to see the blogpost where I talked about the recipe for this paint, which I used right away after making it. We'll see if the fungi survive the freezer. I'm guessing they will since they are long lived in this climate where it freezes every year anyway.
This is the intersection of art and gardening. Fun, too. I believe you can use this paint to decorate pots, too, but mossy pots are not really my cup of tea.
One of the bonuses of following Twitter (thank you, Quinn, for encouraging me to get into it a couple of years back, very good addition to my life) is the amount of incidental learning that happens.
Today, in the course of following some French language timelines, partly because the material's interesting, partly to try to revive my reading French, I found a great post about moss paint.
I've vaguely heard about this, usually for purposes of clarting up flowerpots, not my taste, really, but this was really interesting, in that I have a section of fence which needs something to happen.
It's where the climbing rose canes go all bare as the rose climbs and flowers at the top all the time, very nice, but there's a kind of desolate effect against the fence, while the roses are posing against the sky. Can't put in another shrub, too much competition for the roots, and a danger of cutting down the light anyway.
But, here's the notion: painting with a solution that will enable moss to grow, in the design of my choosing, now that might work. A lovely mossy green background to the canes would be much better than what's there, anyway, that's the idea. The mixture enables the mosses to live and grow on the surface they're painted on.
So I followed the recipe in French, nice how it's all coming back, and ran out to collect moss locally. Meaning within a fifty yard radius of here. Under trees, outside my back gate. So from the viewpoint of greenness, not disturbing the mosses destructively. It also gave the mosquitoes a chance at a good breakfast.
Then rinsed them, took a while to get all the little pebbles and earth off the roots, and found a couple of lovely tiny wildflower specimens which I have to identify, one now planted in with a houseplant.
Then mixed with water, yogurt, spot of honey in the absence of corn syrup, and a little bit of cornstarch, can't hurt. Here's the mixture
and here's the paint
This afternoon, once the sun's off the fence, and I have time to find a bit of charcoal, I'll draw a design there and paint it with moss paint. And hope we don't have a massive downpour right away that washes it off again. The sugar content will probably ensure a visitation of ants, but they're harmless.
Good adventure, this, no harm done at all to the environment, and if it doesn't work, nothing lost anyway.
Other good news: I'm invited to do a display of my artist books at West Windsor Library, in November this year. They have glass cases, so I'm getting a couple of them, the only way really to safely display handmade books. So if you're in the neighborhood, do stop in to the lobby and enjoy them.
