Lichens Quotes

“Here grew willows and alders, their trunks twisted like giants’ sinews. Around them bark lichen bloomed blue-white in the darkness. It felt like a good place, where there was old magic.”
― Duncan Harper, Witch of the Fall

“There is a low mist in the woods—
It is a good day to study lichens.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851

“The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone.”
― Edward Abbey, The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time

“One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future.”
― Steven L. Stephenson, The Kingdom Fungi: The Biology of Mushrooms, Molds, and Lichens

“Time passes, and as the hot midday sun and cool mountain nights alternately bake and freeze the blackened landscape of Vesuvius, something remarkable happens.
Gradually, the streams of cold lava are colonized by a lichen, stereocaulon vesuvianim. This lichen is so tiny that it is almost invisible to the naked eye, but as it grows, it turns the lava from black to silvery gray. Where the lichen has gone, other plants can follow- first mugwort, valerian, and Mediterranean scrub, but later ilex and birch trees, along with dozens of species of apricot.
Meanwhile, the clinkers and ash that covered the landscape like so much grubby gray snow are slowly, inexorably, working their way into the fields and the vineyards, crumbling as they do so, adding their richness to the thick black soil, and an incomparable flavor to tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, fruit and all the other produce which grows there.”
― Anthony Capella, The Wedding Officer

“Lichens are widespread in many deserts. They have no root system, absorbing water vapour from the atmosphere, and are therefore particularly extensive in the world’s coastal foggy deserts. Lichens are a unique group of life forms that consist of two closely related parts, a fungus and a partner that can produce food from sunlight. This partner is usually either an alga, or occasionally a blue-green bacterium known as ‘cyanobacteria’. Algal cells are protected by surrounding fungus which takes nutrition from the algae. When cyanobacteria are involved, nitrogen fixation is an additional benefit.”
― Nick Middleton, Deserts: A Very Short Introduction

“The best hazels for lichens are found in woodlands where hazel forms the dominant canopy, on ridges and knolls or slopes close to the sea. Prime examples are found at Ballachuan Hazelwood SWT Reserve (on the Isle of Seil, Argyll), south of Drimnin (Morvern), Struidh Wood (on Eigg) and Resipole Ravine (Sunart).”
― Brian J. Coppins, Atlantic Hazel: Scotland's Special Woodlands

“Between the disappearance of the river and its re-emegence is like a desert river valley, clearly carved by water, with rounded stones in the bottom and steep sides, but no water running. Yet here there are elm trees, one of which is huge, with a magnificent trunk festooned with mosses, lichens, polypody ferns and fungi, a rich tapestry of rainforest life. Uniquely, it grows horizontally out of the rock, many metres up the sheer wall of the ravine, a completely implausible place for a tree to grow, hanging in complete defiance of the laws of physics.

I stand beneath it, neck craned in awe, looking up into the lush green profusion of its living community. It is winter, so all this greenery isn't the tree's own leaves, but photosynthesising life using it as a climbing frame. Paradoxically, in this dry river valley, everything about its grand gathering of epiphytes declares it to be a rainforest tree. It is a perfect synbol of survival against the odds.”
― Mandy Haggith, The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them