Lichen lore By Maggie Chaplin • Lichen-mainly Golden Shield showing frills and cups L
ichen is one of Nature’s amazing partnerships that often goes
unnoticed. Some lichens are lurid, some are pale and subdued and some so subtle that you don’t notice them, but the chances are that unless you live in a very modern house, there are some within a few yards of your door. What is lichen? It is one of the amazing quirks of nature – that is not in fact an ‘it’ but a ‘they’, and consists of a working relationship between a fungus and an alga. The fungus forms the outer structure, and within its framework live colonies of algae. Fungi cannot make their own food and generally live on some kind of rotting vegetation. Algae on the
other hand can photosynthesise and manufacture nutrients in the form of carbohydrate, so the algae supply food, and the fungus provides support to millions of micro- organisms and protects them against extremes of drought and ultra violet light. The arrangement is mutually beneficial. So where are lichens to be found?
To quote the Beatles song, they are, ‘here, there and everywhere.’ Lichen will live on tree bark, bricks, tiles, plant pots, gravestones, wooden fences – anywhere that’s regularly moist and receives some degree of light. House walls usually dry out and so rarely support much lichen, but outbuildings, garden walls and fences where some damp is inevitable are
ideal for them to grow. Lichens take their time, as
anyone who has sought to ‘age’ a garden ornament knows, but once established they will exist for decades providing that prevailing conditions are suitable. We think of tree bark as being a
fairly uniform colour and walls as being the colour of the stone of which they are made. Look closely and you’ll find that many walls have multiple patches that can be anything from white to bright ochre with shades of grey and green in between. Fences that have not been treated with fungicide will also support a variety of lichens. The palette of subtle shades that lichens provide transforms our
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