Need more green in your life? It may be time to bring moss indoors

Just like pests of the creepy, crawly variety, green growing stuff that feeds on moisture is the last thing you’d want to find in your home.

Summers in Hong Kong can mean months of search and destroy of the mould and mildew which is the curse of our climate. Now, we’re being told that another member of the fungus family – lichen, the kind that reindeer eat – and moss, its plant cousin, are actually good for us.

While prolonged exposure to mould and mildew in the home is linked to chronic health problems such as asthma, studies have found no harm in having a moss garden indoors.

According to researchers at Canada’s University of Guelph, living mosses are an ideal medium for an indoor biofilter. Careful selection of moss species, they say, may reduce VOCs in the air (the chemicals emitted from many paints, glues and certain types of furniture). Mosses can also produce antibiotic compounds and may actually inhibit the growth of biofilm, a form of bacteria which adheres to surfaces.

The notion of house plants cleaning the indoor air is not new. In the early 1980s, a study at NASA – the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration – concluded that certain plants have the ability to remove formaldehyde from air in a closed environment, even though moss wasn’t named as one of them, and you’d also need a lot of them (eight to 15 spider plants, for instance) to continuously purify the air in a home.

Though green walls are sprouting all over urban exteriors, it’s harder for gardens to thrive inside buildings. Plants need sunshine, and water, and usually soil, which is an inconvenient combination for indoor application.