| I've grown a dozen or more species of moss in various terraria and paludaria setups... Of those I've only been able to find the name of two - Grimmia and Polystichum. I am not familiar with Kyoto moss by that name. Basically I would just collect a sample of any moss I came across and throw it in various conditions in a tank and see what it did. Some never survived very long, some hung on but didn't do much, some were champs in certain conditions and impossible in others, and some were so successful they were downright weedy! Most of the mosses I used were far happier growing on a harder substrate like a damp piece of driftwood than they ever were growing on soil. Your biggest concern in a shady terrarium will be plants staying too wet for the amount of light they receive and rotting away. Good ventilation will help this, but if the plants don't have enough light they will either rot or stretch toward light and look weak and leggy. My most successful tanks used light fixtures from ahsupply.com - they are bright, efficient, and they do a good job at directing most of the light to the plants instead of scattering it around the room. Also, I recommend getting your mosses started and growing before adding many other plants because many of the plants that do well in small terraria (miniature orchids and ferns, etc) seem to establish themselves most readily in a bed of moss. The moss can grab directly to hard substrates and in turn becomes a substrate itself. This is how many of the plants you would want to use grow in nature, too. Hope this helped some. |
