RATHDRUM — If you want to have cool, exotic plants to brighten up the place and impress your friends, well, sorry…

You’ll have to get your hands dirty.

Right?

Ah, maybe not.

There’s a woman you need to know if you’d like to display a gorgeous, discussion-starting plant named after a Spanish explorer — and pull it off without a smudge on your fingernails.

Meet Joanna Valli, a stay-at-home mom who had plenty of hobbies but no real business until tragedy struck right at home.

Valli lost three family members in a single year — she still fights back tears trying to talk about it — but instead of curling up in a ball of sorrow, Valli decided to get to work.

What Valli noticed was that an awful lot of people love plants or flowers, but don’t have the time or space to create a garden with, you know, dirt and stuff.

Thus “Urban Dirt” was born, and Valli soon found a specific clientele.

“Urban is the right word,” she said, “because a lot of my customers are living in apartments or condos, or they’re in built-up areas with no space to have a garden — at least not the type that you’d normally think about.

“But I have just what they need, a complete line of plants (she usually has almost 20 varieties in stock) that don’t require any dirt at all.”

Many of the plants from Urban Dirt draw water from the air around them, and none have soil-based roots.

THE MOST unique “plants” in Valli’s inventory spend most of their time in her refrigerator when they’re not being displayed.

These are round, green Marimo balls, actually an algae that is found only in places that have precise conditions of water, light and air — Japan’s Hakkaido island, a single lake in Iceland, and occasional spots in Scotland and Estonia.

In chain stores around the United States, these fuzzy green things sometimes are stocked as “Moss balls,” but they aren’t moss at all — and Valli, who imports her specimens from Lake Akan on Hakkaido, fumes at the fact that many of the Marimo (and some of the other plants she carries) do not get proper care in high-volume stores.

“The Marimos actually need to be rubbed gently in your hands every once in a while,” Valli said. “I’m careful when I explain that to customers, because rolling them keeps them healthy and growing, but if you squeeze too hard you can actually bruise them.”

Marimos have a distinct place in regional Japanese culture. Since the fuzzy little things can live up to 200 years, it’s common for families to pass them on from one generation to the next.

“They tell stories and pass on family history when the Marimo goes to the children,” Valli said. “When the next generation comes, the Marimo has grown — they can get fairly big — but the family history has grown with them.

“It’s a wonderful tradition.”

ON THE other hand, the tale of the delicate Spanish moss that Valli lets hang from tiny baskets has a completely different backstory.

Spanish moss, which actually grows wild all over the place in Florida, is also called “The Old Man’s Beard.”

Valli said she knows it’s just a legend, but still…

The tale goes that a Spanish explorer fell in love with the daughter of a Native American chief in the Florida Keys, but the girl already was promised to another chief in exchange for a hundred horses.

“The story says that the Spaniard only had coffee beans to offer, and the chief wanted the horses,” Valli said. “So the explorer got desperate and stole the daughter, but for some reason he left the beans behind.

“Then the Spaniard was caught and hanged in a nearby grove of trees. But because his heart was pure and his love was genuine, the tree spirits felt sorry for him.

“So today, moss that looks exactly like the old man’s beard hangs all over the state.”

In fact, quite a few of the plants at Urban Dirt are rare or unusual enough that they have unique backstories.

“Hey, I’m a little different,” Valli said, “so I want my plants to be different, too.”

Urban Dirt can be accessed and orders taken on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Urbandirt.info.