09/14/2026
How Bryogrow Came to Be
Bryogrow began with a fairly simple question: What was I supposed to do with everything I knew?
I had moved home to a small town in southeastern Idaho to care for my 95-year-old mother. I had a degree in Agricultural Education and Horticulture and decades of experience growing plants, but I was living in a place with long winters, a short growing season, and relatively few opportunities to put that experience to use. At the same time, I have never been particularly good at sitting still. I have an almost unquenchable need to learn, experiment, build, and discover.
One of the subjects that had always fascinated me was mosses and liverworts. Walking through forests and seeing the extraordinary diversity of these tiny plants made me wonder whether I could bring that world indoors. That curiosity led me into the study of bryophytes—the group of plants that includes mosses and liverworts—and eventually gave the new venture its name: Bryo, from bryophytes, combined with Grow.
Bryogrow was born.
But learning how to grow mosses indoors opened a much larger door.
I began experimenting with terrariums and vivariums and quickly discovered an entire area of horticulture that was largely new to me. I knew traditional greenhouse crops and tropical houseplants, but vivariums introduced me to miniature ferns, orchids, bromeliads, aroids, creeping plants, aquatic plants grown emersed, and other species requiring the stable humidity, light, moisture, and temperature of a tropical rainforest.
Modern LED lighting made something possible that would have been far more difficult years ago: I could create those environments indoors without depending on natural sunlight.
So I converted my garage into a laboratory.
The building was insulated and temperature controlled. Electrical systems were adapted for a wet growing environment. A drain was installed. Reverse-osmosis water was distributed throughout the room, and the individual enclosures were connected to irrigation systems that could provide regular artificial rainfall. Because draining dozens of tanks individually would have been impractical, I designed a centralized drainage system connecting the enclosures directly to the building drain.
Before long, nearly every usable space in the garage contained a tank, enclosure, propagation area, or growing system.
Then came the plants.
Finding them proved far more difficult than building the laboratory. Many of the species used by serious vivarium growers are not produced by ordinary commercial greenhouses. I began tracing plants through collectors, specialty growers, hobbyists, and importers, learning where they originated and how they could be legally acquired, propagated, and eventually offered for resale.
Each plant became an experiment.
Could it tolerate constant humidity? Did it need moving water or merely moist substrate? How much light produced compact growth? Would it climb, creep, attach to wood, grow emersed, or remain small enough for a miniature landscape?
As the tanks matured, the laboratory gradually became its own production system. Plants grow until an enclosure becomes crowded, then portions are harvested, propagated, and grown into new plants for sale.
But a vivarium is more than plants.
I also began building the biological systems that make these environments function. Springtails and isopods were introduced to consume decaying organic matter, control molds and fungi, and recycle nutrients. That meant learning an entirely new discipline: how to culture and maintain the organisms that form the foundation of a miniature ecosystem.
The next stage will bring those systems full circle with dart frogs inhabiting selected mature vivariums. Their presence will add another part of the biological cycle while eventually allowing Bryogrow to produce captive-bred animals alongside the plants and microfauna that support them.
What began as an experiment with moss had become a functioning vivarium laboratory.
Bryogrow has also grown beyond the laboratory itself. Developing and maintaining a collection like this requires a continuing source of income, so I began establishing relationships with specialty growers and suppliers who could provide unusual tropical plants for local retail customers as well as plants specifically suited for vivariums. Those sales help support the laboratory, utilities, propagation work, and continued expansion of the collection.
And throughout the entire process, I kept researching.
Every plant raised another question, and every question led to another investigation. Eventually I realized that the information I was collecting might be just as valuable as the plants themselves. That became Bryogrow.com—a growing horticultural reference where the knowledge developed through the laboratory can be organized and shared with other vivarium keepers.
Bryogrow therefore isn't simply a greenhouse or a plant store.
It is the result of taking decades of horticultural experience into an unfamiliar field and becoming a student again. It is part nursery, part laboratory, part ecosystem, and part continuing experiment.
And strangely enough, it all began with a little moss growing on the forest floor.
