Indoor Gardening and Houseplants: My Air Plants, 1 by drdawg43

drdawg43 wrote:
When I became a Master Gardener several years ago, I asked why there was no Spanish moss in the Starkville area (we are approximately 300 miles north of the Gulf). The MG's said it was just too cold up here and we didn't have the right trees (Live Oaks and Cypress) that Spanish moss loves to grow on.

Well, I decided that I would "grow" Spanish moss and had a friend who lives on the MS Gulf coast bring up a garbage bag full of moss. I draped it on a few lower limbs of some of my oak trees. After a year the moss had grown twice as fast as normal Spanish moss (perhaps because I water and fertilize it along with the rest of my outside tropical plants!). I had so much that I began draping it on a lot of my mounted plants. Three years later I have a great deal of it on all my oaks and even with our severe winter last year (and the beginning of a worse one this year), it is doing fine. My fellow MG's just scratch their collective heads.

As a bonus, my Spanish moss blooms every spring. Nobody that I have ever spoken too has ever seen it bloom. The blooms are bright green and tiny, but they are there. You might have to click on the picture to see the flowers. The second picture shows the spent flower/seed pod from last year's bloom.

P. S. I don't like to be told I can't do something!............LOL

Ken