Take a walk anywhere and you are bound to see bright patches of moss blanketing a boulder, clinging to a tree, or growing between the bricks of a walkway. Even so, this beautiful plant is largely overlooked by most gardeners, despite the many benefits it offers. 

      As a landscape plant, moss offers a lot of versatility with its range of colors, textures, and shapes. It is an evergreen plant that will provide interest in your garden when other plants are dormant, and it also happens to be deer resistant.

      These hardworking plants can be planted as a ground cover or lawn replacement, grown on rocks and structures to create focal points, used to create moss art in combination with other natural elements, or even crafted into kokedama (round, decorative moss balls). They offer so many opportunities to add beauty to your yard!

      Regardless of how you choose to use it in your garden, moss is a time saver – something all gardeners appreciate. It needs no fertilizer and only occasional watering because it absorbs water and nutrients from the environment, not from a root system.  And it naturally provides some weed control too, due to its dense, mat-forming habit. 

      Ecologically, mosses are environmental powerhouses. They can be used to prevent soil erosion and reduce the effects of flooding since they are capable of absorbing 10 times their weight in water. Their most important feature though, is their ability to remove toxins and carbon dioxide from the air. This helps clean the air we breathe and makes mosses the largest carbon repository on the planet – a big job for a small plant!

Sources:   Moss Acres    TN Nursery    Green Mountain Moss    The Spruce    Local nurseries