Could you tell me how to replace grass with moss in the shady areas of our lawn?
There are a number of options for replacing the grass in the shady part
of your garden. Should you decide to cultivate moss, Oregon State University’s page (now archived) on Encouraging Mosses should be of interest.
There are two books I would recommend, Moss Gardening by George Schenk
(Timber Press, 1997), particularly the chapter on “Moss Carpets,” and How
to Get Your Lawn Off Grass by Carole Rubin (Harbour Publishing, 2002).
Rubin gives directions for preparing your site, which involve digging out
existing plants or smothering the lawn with mulches of
leaves (12 inches), bark (3 inches), or newspaper (10 sheets thick).
Schenk offers several different methods for creating a moss garden.
Briefly paraphrasing, these are:
- Work with nature, allowing self-sown spores of moss to take hold.
(Prepare the site by weeding, raking, and perhaps rolling the surface
smooth). - Encourage the moss in an existing lawn by weeding out grass. You can
plant what the author calls “weed mosses” which will spread, such as
Atrichum, Brachythecium, Calliergonella, Mnium, Plagiothecium,
Polytrichum, and others. - Instant carpet: you can moss about 75 square feet if you have access
to woods from which large amounts of moss can be removed legally. - Plant moss sods at spaced intervals (about one foot apart) and wait
for them to grow into a solid carpet.Choose plants that match your soil
and site conditions. - Grow a moss carpet from crumbled fragments. This is rarely done, and
only a few kinds of moss will grow this way, including Leucobryum,
Racomitrium, and Dicranoweisia.
In her book Big Ideas for Northwest Small Gardens, Marty Wingate
recommends Mazus reptans. It is semi-evergreen to evergreen with tiny
blue flowers from late spring through summer. It takes full sun to part
shade and is delicate looking, but takes foot traffic. It requires some
fertilizer to stay perky. Another source of ideas is the website www.stepables.com. Click on “plant info,” then
“plant search.”
Another ground cover that can take foot traffic is Leptinella gruveri
“Miniature Brass Buttons.”