Cibodas Moss Garden, the One and Only

The most unique garden in Indonesia and even in this world, that worth to be visited is moss garden. The location of this garden is in Cibodas Botanical Garden on the slope of Gede Pangrango Mountain at Cimacan village, Pacet, Cianjur, West Java. The elevation of the garden is 1275 meters above sea level and the temperature is 17 – 27 Celsius.
Moss for many people is considered as a useless plant and has to be removed. Actually, this kind of plant is not useless, it can be useful as well. Some people in Indonesia, traditionally uses it to be medicine for diarrhea, hepatitis, skin and eye problem. The other useful role of moss or bryophyte is keeping the soil’s humidity, produce oxygen and absorb air pollutants.

Being part of the Cibodas Botanical Garden, this moss garden is the only outdoor bryophyte garden in the world and it has the most collection of moss species. The moss garden is built for the purpose of education, conservation and tourism. For now on it has more than 216 species of moss such as Polythrichum, spagnum, Usnea, Marchantia, etc. The mosses are collected from the Indonesian forests such as from Cibodas itself, Sumatra and Kalimantan.

The garden is designed specially to be the place for moss or bryophyte can be grown. Some areas are wet, shaded or exposed and some mosses are attached to the trees or wood. The landscape is also built artistically just like the miniature of Gede Pangrango mountain, the map of the Botanical garden, valley, river, waterfall and the miniature of tropical rain forest. The moss also covered the trees and it branches so we might imagine that we are in the very old jungle. The field is built to give a very interesting view that a lot of us are rarely seeing such view. As the garden is built in the botanical garden which has many collection of trees such as pine, pinophyta or coniferae, etc., has fressh air and cold temperature it made the feeling that we travel to the deep of a jungle.

The moss garden in Cibodas Botanical Garden is not the only place that can be visited. It has other interesting places such as waterfall, flower garden, Bandung Asri Mulya golf field and camping ground and we can do forest tour,. The camping ground can occupy for 200 tents and facilitated with public toilets.

How to get there?
The garden is near to Jakarta and Bandung. From Jakarta or Bandung, take the bus to Puncak, Cianjur, take a stop at Cibodas t-junction (if you’re from Jakarta, it is after Puncak), take a Cipanas-Rarahan bus and take a stop at Balai Taman Nasional Gede-Pangrango, take a walk to the garden. The easiest way is arrange the tour with the travel agent in Jakarta or Bandung.

Comments