Some gardeners will fight moss off their lawn and patios until their last breath; others will simply embrace it for sheer laziness or, I prefer to think, tasteful refinement. Slowly but surely, moss the enemy is creeping up on the better grounds of our appreciation.

Moss are archaic, non-vascular plants, put away in their own division called Bryophyta. There are about 12 000 species of them on the planet. As a lawn substitute in the shade, moss does marvels, consuming a fraction of the water, allowing some foot traffic, requiring no moving and leaving deer blah. In the woodland garden, they complement ferns and other delicate treasures, setting them off (if it doesn’t swamp them over) nicely all year round.

Moss nurseries are elusive; I remember working at Quaker Hill Native Plant Garden, trying to localize some, to no avail. When moss was needed, one was left hanging- yet with a few basic steps one doesn’t need to ‘hang’ too long before results are seen. Things have changed since then, it seems like. Moss Acres, located in NE Pennsylvania, will ship boxfuls of four types of moss anywhere in Canada and the United-States. It is the nursery that supplied the moss required for the courtyard of the New York Times Building, work of  Renzo Piano and fellow Vancouverite Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

And speaking of New York, let’s the aforementioned newspaper have the last word, as a warning against a rare affliction I would happily call bryophytomania: “T.J. Turgeon is an executive at a private bank in Manhattan for wealthy people (…). He began growing moss four years ago (and soon) he was filling trash bags with the stuff. I’m having an absolute blast with it, Mr. Turgeon said. I’m great at a dinner party because I can talk about moss and no one’s ever heard it before. People think I’m out of my mind. Wherever I go, I take moss.” Moss at your own risk!