Flora

With fronds like these...

Who needs anemones?

Forest Floor Moss is used as a substrate in vivariums. It's real plant life dried and compressed into a solid block of material which, when dunked in water, magically reforms itself into a mass of real plants. It's highly compressed, so a whole block makes a lot of moss (3.5 litres in fact). You will get many thousands of tiny plants from one small block. You can buy it from pet shops which specialise in reptiles or from Amazon.

I chop off about a 3/4" cube of the dry stuff and after soaking in water, I spread it out a little and let it dry out. It now resembles the brown material in the photo above. At this stage the plants are fragile.

I prepare a 50/50% mixture of green acrylic paint and water (with the obligatory touch of washing up liquid) then I add about 30% pva glue. If you add acrylic paint directly to pva glue it tends to go lumpy or separate out. It shouldn't be too thick in consistency.

After sorting through the  dry moss to find the best scale plant like bits, I dip the tiny plants into the mixture one at a time, and let them soak for a few seconds before laying them on a paper kitchen towel to absorb the excess pva. While the glue is soaking away, you can poke the plants into a suitable realistic shape. The glue makes them more supple and less prone to break.

Once the majority of the glue/paint mixture has been absorbed into the towel, I lay the plants out on a piece of greaseproof paper to dry.

Teeny Tiny flowers

You need:
A hole punch or a wad cutter, Some tissue, felt pens, a piece of thin soft rubber or foam.

The tissue needs to be the crinkly kind which you find as packing in new shoes or wrapped around loaves of bread and not the kind you blow your nose on.

Punch out lots of little disks of tissue and using the tip of a felt pen, press them into the surface of the rubber. the idea is to form a cone or trumpet shape (a flower shape even) You'll find that the ink transfers from the pen to the tissue, you can put a dot of another colour in the middle of the disk first to give your flower a contrasting centre. For white flowers, use a pencil, a colour pencil will give you a coloured centre.

 Beware of the Flowers (John Otway 1977)

Then I stick the flowers to the stems using dots of pva. After many hours of relaxing fun, you have enough for a whole garden.