Chicken Wire and Moss Toadstool Living Sculpture

A recent visit to a wonderful woodland sculpture park inspired us to try our hand at making some sculpture of our own. Our first creation is a chicken wire and moss toadstool which turned out to be super simple to make, and has added such a magical element to our garden.

Chicken wire

Moss

Succulent Plants

We started with an old piece of chicken wire, which we folded into four, and then wrapped around a bowl to give us a rough toadstool shape. Although we did then have to open the wire up again, to remove the bowl, I think it still really helped to get the basic form.

We then simply filled our wire form with moss that we collected from a wooded area behind our house. The area we live in has a clay soil, and is permanently damp, so we have an abundance of moss, but if you don't have access to live moss I'm sure that dried, or other organic matter would work equally well.

Once we had filled our shape, we simply folded the wire in, to hold the moss in place.

We then planted some tiny succulents straight into the top, using a pencil to make little planting holes.

To make the stem for our toadstool, we used another piece of chicken wire. This time we folded the wire in half, and then rolled it up into a tube, lining the final third with a little more moss.

We used bamboo canes to secure this to the ground, and to help secure our top to the stem.

From start to finish, this project only took about half an hour. It was super easy to make, and it really does look fabulous. I plan to move it to a more shaded area of the garden, which will be a nicer habitat for the moss, and hope that it will continue to grow and develop over time.

We've got lots more craft and gardening tutorials over on our blog CraftInvaders and would love it if you popped over and said Hi!