However the writing turns out, she is an accomplished monologuist. “I come from a line of talkers,” she said. In her Appalachian cadence, which she says she likes to embellish for theatrical effect, a word like “moss” can fill two syllables, sometimes three. Put another way, though she grew up the daughter of a dentist and made a career in college media production, today she sounds more like Kathleen Turner playing the matriarch of the McCoy clan.

It takes time to soliloquize in such a glorious fashion, and Ms. Martin declared that the bulimia-center roof rescue could wait until the afternoon. Or, she added, “We can skulk around tonight and check out the air-conditioner behind the BI-LO grocery store.” A patch of Ceratodon purpureus, with its fine filigree of leaves, could be found there in a state of total neglect. She lit another Salem, jumped in her truck and headed to her home grounds on the outside of town.

Ms. Martin’s house is a smoke-free zone, which means she is free to smoke as she pleases. Her two adult sons live in Atlanta, close to where she recently installed a 2,000-square-foot, $75,000 moss garden for a client, replete with a moss bed and pillows. Her only housemate these days is Redman, a “mutt dog” named after the rapper and actor from the stoner hit “How High.”

This leaves Ms. Martin more time for mossin’. The yard is a crazy quilt of some 35 moss species. Or maybe it looks more like a cammo-patterned bedspread. Ms. Martin began 15 years ago in the corner, creating little moss vignettes: Leucobryum glaucum (pincushion moss) mounded like moguls in a ski park for fairies and Climacium americanum multiplied like an outbreak of green gummy worms.

In the beginning, she identified both of these plants generically: They were simply “moss.” Yet mosses comprise perhaps 12,000-plus species, and more than 400 of them grow in North Carolina. The southern Appalachians represent one of the nation’s two “moss belts”; the other is the Pacific Northwest. Here in Transylvania County, it’s not unusual for 60 or even 80 inches of rain to fall in a year.

“Mosses grow naturally in a lot of yards here without any effort,” she said. Growing nothing but mosses, however, takes an unnatural ardor.

Weeding was a start, and she used that word broadly. Ms. Martin eliminated nearly everything that wasn’t a bryophyte. (This is a classification that traditionally has included mosses and their allies, liverworts and hornworts, which look more attractive than they sound, although that’s not saying much.)