Folk recipes for growing moss rest on real fragment regeneration

Evidence

There’s no good science to suggest how to start mosses on rocks, but there are reports of a kind of moss magic in the folklore of gardeners. … The most common recommendation is much more hygienic, a moss milkshake. The recipe goes like this: collect the moss species of interest from similar rocks in the forest. Be sure to take only mosses growing in the same conditions that are found in your garden. The same kind of rock, the same light and humidity. No cutting corners allowed, the mosses will know the difference. … Mosses can indeed regenerate themselves from severed leaves and stems. Under the right conditions a fragment will put out proonema to anchor itself to the new substrate and tiny little shoots can arise … Mosses propagate themselves this way in nature, so perhaps a blender will help the process along. Many mosses prefer an acidic habitat, which might be provided by the buttermilk, at least until the first rain. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 524

Categorization

• CANDY: The moss milkshake recipe — moss blended with buttermilk painted onto rocks — is a perfectly tweetable, shareable oddity.
• XREF: Pairs with ch35’s point that a moss garden needing wild harvesting is not self-sustaining — folk instant-moss recipes collide with the time�epth of natural colonies. — connects to: Moss colonies establish only through a rare, poorly understood succession — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 519; A moss garden that needs wild harvesting is not self-sustaining — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 514; Old-growth moss communities embody centuries that no technique can compress — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 535