The mossy wall

I'm not sure about you, but coming up with a plan can take me ages, and then at the last moment, just before I'm about to implement the agreed PLAN A, I come up with what I convince myself is a much better PLAN B, and that's what happened with our plans for "what to do with all that Spanish moss" on the weekend. 

To cut to the chase, here's what we did, pictured below. We've stuck it on a wall, or rather, hung it on a wire trellis on a wall.

Originally, we were going to distribute the Spanish moss in batches to every available spare tree branch on our olive, lemon, lime and frangipani trees. All this was made necessary by the demise of the moss's former home, a nice big old grevillea which blew over in a storm.

At the same time we were relocating our moss, PLAN C was to buy a replacement climber to plant under the wire trellis which has, for the last few disappointing years, supported Australia's least productive passionfruit vine. I pulled down the passionfruit vine in December, and we originally thought we'd plant something safe, such as a star jasmine climber.

The wire trellis is very solid, mounted on bolts drilled into this brick wall, with the wires fairly taut. And so I've just stuffed goodly handfuls of Spanish moss behind the wires, and draped the tresses over the front. We've already had two rainstorms and a fair bit of wind, and almost none of it has blown off, so it's "so far so good".

Our Spanish moss grows like crazy here, and that's because I water it a lot. We draped some light strands in our olive tree a year or so ago, and with regular watering they are now wonderful, thick manes of the stuff. As the the wall of moss is next to our thirsty lemon tree, I am sure I won't forget to give it a good, light spray whenever I'm in that part of the garden.

The only way we'll know if this idea works is if it works over a decent period of time. If it does, expect an update in a year's time. And if it turns out to be a dud, I'll let you know about that, too. But somehow I think it's going to work ... I'm a bit tragic like that when when I come up with my last-minute PLAN Bs.