Mosses are the residual scum, the memory threading from the moment their algal ancestors rose from the shores of a receding primordial ocean. Bryophytes, their scientific name, means what grows, multiplies and proliferates; from the Greek brúon, “moss”, and the verb brúo (as in embryo), to grow in abundance, to ferment, and phutón, “plant, vegetal” from phyein, to grow, probably from the proto Indo-European root-stem *bheue, “to be, to exist, to grow”. Their etymology is redundant, witness to their resoluteness, their determination to be of this world, to belong here, wherever here is: on rocks and walls, bogs and wood, parking lots and mine sites, acid or alkaline soils, wherever.