I don't remember the first time I saw lichen. I know it grew on old drystane dykes I used to climb over, on the first farm where I was old enough to go stravaigin across the fields. That was in deepest Ayrshire in the 1950's.
Over the years since, I've interrupted countless walks to stop and admire and wonder at lichen's and mosses. The intricacy and durability of these botanical miracles, the range of colours, mostly pastel, the way they soften and transform the shape of stone, wood, bark and other surfaces barely hospitable to organic life and growth.
Yesterday walking in the Bin Forest just north of Huntly, I was again fascinated and in my element, enjoying again these miniature masterpieces of organic architecture. It's an old forest, still managed and harvested, but a lot of the fallen trees, broken branches and older wood has lain for years, and have become lichen plantations.
One old tree stump, hollowed out over the years, has now filled with moss and lichen, and it is a marvel of artistic innovation and natural beauty. A photograph doesn't do justice to the textured diversity in such a microcosm of delicate invasion, but it is one way of remembering the several minutes of contemplative joy at such wondrously casual achievement over years.
The Victorian John Ruskin wrote some of the most polished prose in the English language; some of his descriptive writing reads like a literary version of a Monet garden. The overall impression is of beauty, delicate tones and shades and softened shapes somehow coalesce, forming an image that has accuracy of emotional impression, rather than descriptive precision. Yet to gaze at a Monet lily pond is to have the deepest and most durable inner impression of precisely that moment of physical encounter. Ruskin's prose can be like that. His description of mosses and lichens in Modern Painters has that same quality when emotional impressionism becomes a vehicle of visionary description.
Here is Ruskin in gorgeous full flow:
No words that I know of will say what mosses and lichens are. None are delicate enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green- the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine filmed, as if the Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass – the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, aborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace…
Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the most honoured of the earth children. Unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow fingered, constant hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of the cowslip god – far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, starlike on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.
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