Love The Lichen

In our role as caretakers of Paradise, Dennis and I have always lived as organically as possible. We use only organic methods to control disease and insects in our garden, we’ve never sprayed or dusted any chemical on our yard, and we have not treated our redwood deck with a preservative.

Oh, we know the deck would last years longer if the wood were treated. We just don’t care. We love its weathered look and its inhabitants – five-lined skinks, Virginia creeper vines, a pair of Carolina wrens, and lichens. The skinks, the ivy, and the wrens are seasonal, but the lichens are always there, living on and just below the deck railing. Their growth is infinitesimal but steady over the decades. I’ve grown to love lichen for its quiet, unobtrusive beauty.

Lichen is not only beautiful, but also an interesting life form, or to be more precise, two interesting life forms living symbiotically. One half of this partnership is either an alga or a cyanobacteria. Through photosynthesis that half produces energy that feeds itself and the other partner, a fungus. The fungus benefits the alga by providing a rather moist, nutritious place to hang its hat.

The lichen usually spreads by slowly expanding its territory but once in a while, in the right conditions these unlikely partners engage in some hanky-panky when both release reproductive cells. That is what is happening in our lichen right now, possibly triggered by a spell of rainy weather. The pink is an apothecium, the fungal spore cells. The black cups in the aqua parts have opened to release little algal cells.

Aren’t they beautiful? If we treated our deck they could not live here. I’m so glad we haven’t missed out on this phenomenon.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer