Longtime readers may remember I've admitted to not caring for staghorn ferns. Well, until suddenly I did. Last summer I put together this trashcan-lid hanging staghorn based on a design I saw from Max on Instagram.![]()
I loved it then, I love it now—but more importantly I've kept it alive for almost a year!
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Alive through time spent both outdoors and indoors... I am (to quote a friend) feeling quite chuffed!
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Fast forward to this summer and I got a sweet card from my parents with some $ earmarked for flowers or a plant. They'd intended to send me flowers after my ankle surgery but were busy and didn't get around to it. I figured this kind of monetary gift is meant to be spent somewhat frivolously. See something you love but wouldn't normally buy? Grab it. That's just what I did when I saw an interesting staghorn at Tony's Garden Center. I already had the planter but hadn't yet used it... I think they make a great pair.
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Just the staghorn alone seemed a little under sized for the planter—even though it's a large plant—so I added a tillandsia and some Spanish moss, Tillandsia usneoides.
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The "horns" are pretty spectacular on their own...
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Mom says she doesn't care for the Tillandsia usneoides, as it looks fake. I like how it softens the hard shape of the planter. Of course it helps that I am a huge fan of Spanish moss...
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As you may have guessed from the title of this post, there is now a third staghorn in my garden. The purchasing of this plant—a Platycerium bifurcatum 'Netherlands'—predates the last, as I picked it up at Rare Plant Research in May. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, so it just sat untouched for 3 months until I was finally able to tackle the project.
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I covered the soil and sphagnum moss with green moss I'd been collecting, I then wove the string back and forth and through the wire mesh. Obviously this string could quickly rot, so I am going to have to reinforce it before that happens.
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I tucked in more moss to hide the string and this is what it looked like—almost finished.
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I say "almost" because I felt like another layer of planting needed to occur in that moss. Rhipsalis to the rescue! (maybe Rhipsalis pilocarpa?)
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I cut up a small houseplant I had and tucked the stems into the moss where it should quickly root. Then the whole thing was hung on the "green wall" (aka our fence)...
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I absolutely love it and I'm thrilled that it came together pretty much as I envisioned it would.
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Will it thrive? Only time will tell. I had no idea what I was doing when I made the original staghorn trashcan lid or the three bromeliad mounts that surround this creation on the fence, and they've been going strong for a couple of years now.
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The only thing that makes me a little unhappy is that I didn't get to do this in May or June—that the project had to wait until August. Why? because The Great Migration* is getting ever closer...
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The plant has three shields, this pair which I chose to use as the front...
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...and this one that is now hidden at the back.
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I picked up a pair of pizza screens for a couple of bucks at a metal salvage spot here in Portland. I now know that you can get shiny new screens for not much more than I paid for used ones (here and here), but like that I'm reusing something that may have ended up in a landfill. I started the project by piling sphagnum moss on the screen...
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Andrew loves buying me garden tools for my birthday, so I used this new wicked blade to cut off the backside of the potted staghorn soil/root mass.
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Now it's flat!
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I laid it against the moss...
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Then I added more soil...
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...and more moss, trying to make a softly slopping shape around the root mass. This is where you might be wondering if I knew what I was doing. Nope. This was just an idea. Would it work? Dunno. But I'm having fun trying.
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In retrospect I should have used something more permanent than this string to tie it all together—wire may have been a better choice. I built the bromeliad mount I recently shared with fishing line and I was DONE playing with that material so this is what I grabbed.
*The Great Migration = when non-hardy plants need to be moved to a protected location to survive the winter.
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