I have purchased small quantities of living moss several times both on Amazon and on Etsy, and I have never received anything like this before. I was aware of the company having its detractors, I think in regards to plants or other things not being received, but the guarantees provided by Amazon gave me the reassurance to try them. First off, I love the hobby of terrariums, and most moss samples you purchase appear more to have come from the wild, which can pose some ethical concerns about how it is being collected and at what cost to its native environment. To that end, there is a clear incentive to purchasing farm-raised moss. Though some people treat this as a myth, like frog farming, this purchase right here proves that moss is effectively being grown and sold from a greenhouse. These are simple common species, but they arrive completely dried on a paper that is like a dryer sheet. I guess that is a type of hardware cloth, maybe. Then that paper is put into a plastic bag that gives the product a more gift-shop vibe like an individually wrapped cookie. I have to marvel at how well they dried it without killing it, and these are VERY young samples, I am guessing no more than a year old, maybe less even. So, when you first remove these you have to be gentle because they are brittle before you rehydrate them. They arrive so dry that I am sure some people will just use them decoratively like preserved moss is used. For people using this in a terrarium, you have two challenges. First is that these are very square samples, but also I think they should be rehydrated in the terrarium. What I am saying is that there is a point where you both do and also do not want these to fall apart on you. You want to get them in place and not have them crumble en route, but once you have them in place, you will likely want to dismantle them a bit to get a more natural layout. So, for a person who has worked with a lot of moss, these samples made me chuckle at how they are kind of wimpy in terms of their maturity and them being common species, but once I started working with them I found that this is a very useful state for the moss to be in. It has all of it's green color but it's totally dry. My conclusion is that this was grown and dried with a marvelous amount of precision, and I am grateful it was not taken from the wild both because of protecting the environment but also because it doesn't have any unwanted pests. Once I rehydrated this, it immediately transformed the whole smell of my terrarium from the new dirt smell to a natural wet forest smell.
