Lichen Landscapes

I went up north recently to visit my Grandma and while I was walking around her yard I kept noticing lichens everywhere.  They were small and probably not very noticeable to most, but they really stuck out to me because they were still much larger then the vast majority of the lichens that grow where I live. (And of the few that are larger, I haven’t seen any that are as brightly colored or intricately textured like the ones I was finding at my Grandma’s. This isn’t to say there aren’t any interesting lichens where I live, but they’re just generally much smaller and harder to find.) Lichens are pretty amazing, but I don’t know a whole lot about them, really. Most of what I do know is from reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (which I highly recommend), which was enough to pique my interest. So, for this post I don’t have much to say about the individual photos, I just think they look cool.

“They blur the definition of what it means to be an individual, as a lichen is not one being, but two: a fungus and an alga. These partners are as different as could be and yet are joined in a symbiosis so close that their union becomes a wholly new organism.” (From the chapter about lichens in Braiding Sweetgrass.)

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