In 2018 I was introduced to a new material. As goes it with most things in my professional career, I was asked if I could make something and said yes, thinking I could rush home and YouTube the knowledge needed like Neo in the Matrix. Unfortunately, with this, there were no how tos, so I had to make it up as I went along.
'Can you make a moss wall with some wood elements?' was the request from an office plant rental company I do some work for. I knew what moss was and I knew what wood was so of course I said yes. The only other guidance was that the wood should be Acacia and they would provide the moss and a special glue to attach it to the wall.
I had heard of Acacia but never saw it available to buy. I searched all of the timber merchants I usually use, but none of them supplied it. It is a shrub or tree that grows in very warm climates and the wood is known for its density and good longevity outside. Apparently, it is good for cutting boards or outdoor furniture. This is all academic because I couldn't get any. I let the client know, but said I would find something which I thought would work for the woodwork. After much research, I settled on Poplar, which is a very cheap hardwood. It is normally used for painted cabinetry but, the best things about it were that it had a similar exotic look, it was available and soft for easy machining. Besides this, if I couldn't tell the difference, I'm sure no one else could.
I bought a slab and got the mill to saw it into boards for me.
The grain really was quite beautiful and I began to lay them out on my workshop floor where I made a chalk drawing of the wall to be covered. It was a bit of a Tetris puzzle as I tried to use everything I had to create a composition. The wood grain helped inspire some of the decisions, as I wanted to add some curves to make it appear like trees with branches.
Slowly but surely, the image started to come together. There was a lot of cutting as I tried to use all the bits of wood. The curves were cut with a jigsaw and finished with a belt sander.
Everything was going swimmingly until my jigsaw exploded in my hand. I've never had such a catastrophic failure of a tool and I was lucky it didn't kill me. The whole case and mechanism blew to bits with metal shards and plastic going everywhere. This jigsaw owed me nothing, as I had had it for years and used it for many projects. I'm glad it died with such a heroic ending and not in a whimper. I had to get a new one, and luckily, Lidl had one in the middle aisle, which was battery-operated. It was actually much better as it had all the modern gizmos like speed control and a pendulum cut (If you know, you know)
I got everything finished and labelled, with just the final end cuts still to do onsite. This gave room for adjustment if needed.
I had asked the builders to add a frame around the area and cover the surface in wooden sheets. Then piece by piece I built the wooden tree image. I stuck everything on with glue held in place with straps till it dried. I didnt want to use nails or screws as they would have been visible and taken away from the effect.
Then I started working with the moss.
The type of moss is called ball moss. It is like little round pillows of moss that has a flat surface on one side. It comes from a company in Holland. I actually think they grow it specially for this purpose. There were no instructions so what I found the best thing to do was smear lots of glue on the wall and then piece the balls together like tiles. Even though it was tedious, it was a Zen-like fun to see the whole thing come together.
In areas where the balls left a gap I used another moss called Reindeer moss to fill them in.
It took me two days to add the moss, making sure all the gaps were filled. I learned as I went how best to vary the pattern to make it look organic.
The other tradespeople were still on-site doing their thing and it was a bit hectic as we tripped over each other to get things finished for opening.
I was happy enough with the results, considering it was my first try with these materials. I knew I had a lot to learn but didn't realise that I would have lots of opportunity to as moss walls where really going to take off as a part of interior design in office decoration and I was the pioneer in Ireland.
The moss is real but it is mummified so it doesn't need any watering of maintainace. I will share more of this type of work, along with other projects I have been doing in this field.
