“All the leaves are brown
And the sky is gray.
I’ve been for a walk
On a winter’s day.”— John and Michelle Phillips
The bleak landscape of late fall and early winter has bits of brightness. The white birches stand out against the brown hillsides and as the sun rises the peeling bark of my Acer griseum, the paperbark maple, is backlit, glowing with a coppery shine. Down at the ground level I have been appreciating the bits of color on a shelf of exposed ledge by the house, a home to mosses and lichens, a terrestrial world that evokes fairies and other little beings. The two lichen growing here are members of the Cladonia genus. Cladonia cristatella has short stalks of light green with bright red tips, a red that was the same color as the coats of British in the Revolutionary War and since then the lichen has been called British soldiers. Growing amidst them are tiny green chalices, C.chlerophaea, the mealy pixie cup lichen, perfect for holding drinks for the little people.
“There is a low mist in the woods
It is a good day to study lichens.”— Henry David Thoreau
I often walk down the road a piece. At this time of year the evergreen Christmas ferns, Polysticum acrotichoides, along the sides are a welcome color in a gray world. And there is a downed branch with startling orange blobs along it, orange jelly fungus, Dacrymycescrysospermus, also called orange witch’s butter. The road dead ends at the birthplace of Mary Lyon, the pioneer of women’s education. The cellar hole of her house is preserved as a shrine. Behind it is an outcropping that is completely covered with reindeer lichen, another member of the genus Cladonia, C.rangiferina, a winter foodstuff for caribou and reindeer. A beautiful mat of silvery gray branches of the reindeer lichen has some British soldiers and pixie cups hiding amongst them. Then, a few steps away, is a boulder sitting on the ground with a natural garden of lichens covering it. Other wildings are sprouting from crevasses in the stone, a bit of yarrow, its dried flower still attached, and a prickly bramble. It is a perfect garden, created with no human input.
Lichens are plantlike organisms consisting of a partnership between algae or Cyanobacteria and fungi. Each lichen is named for its fungal component. They transfer nitrogen from the air into the soil and break down wood and stone. Lichens are very sensitive to air pollution and will suffer from sulfur dioxide and heavy metals in the air. They also accumulate radioactivity. In 1986, after the release of radioactive gases from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, reindeer in Scandinavia were found with high levels of radiation in their milk and flesh. Thousands were destroyed.
The Cladonia lichen are categorized as fructose, those that are upright or hanging. On stones and tree trunks are flat, crusty lichen bound to the surface of their choice, known as crustose. Often these lichens are passed by blending into landscape as nothing worthy of noticing, but under closer inspection they prove to offer intricate patterning in grays, pale greens, yellows, or rusty oranges. They seem especially appropriate when covering gravestones. Lawrence Millman wrote, “As for myself, I’d be pleased, no, delighted to have lichens adorning my own gravestone. In addition to their aesthetic appeal, they’d be an indication of the biodiversity of the natural world,”
My garden is frozen and sleeping. I have to find a bit of color and life elsewhere. Outside my window are the brick red clusters of sumac berries against a bright blue sky and on the ground is the miniature world of lichens. Until the snow comes and covers this terrestrial universe I will be hanging out in a place with little red soldiers, reindeer food, and goblets fit for pixies. Until spring.
“Thank you to the brilliance of wet moss and lichen.”—Hirohito Goto
October 2022