Few Lichens Left

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A FEW LICHENS LEFT J. C . N .

WILLIS

I have a liking for these most ancient of plants, that when our Earth was ready for Vegetation, prepared a soil and habitat for the next vegetable division—the Mosses and much later Flowering Plants. Being very old they are generally despised—not only are they old in the vegetable kingdom, individual plants may have lived on the same Spot for two or three hundred years. That patch of gold on the roof-tiles was there in the 16th Century—as old as the roof itself. They grow extremely slowly and a plant the size of a sixpence is 300 years later the size of a Shilling or half-crown. But they get no honour for antiquity or age. I once caught a relative busily scraping them off the trunks of her apple-trees. I protested "It's lovely". "But look how it has killed that tree over there." "No, that tree was probably dead before they lighted on it. They have no root or suckers to draw sustenance out of the bark or wood. Those threads are rhizoids (root-like) hold-fast only. Lichens are symbionts, an intimate union of a fungus and an alga. The fungi are of species not found growing independently as other fungi do, but the algae do so occur. On bare rocks or sand and living on air (that is the alga's part in the association) they made soil and protection for mosses to grow among them. One sees the two together all over Breckland and on tree-trunks and walls. We are fortunate in SufTolk that great factory chimneys and domestic chimneys have not yet so fouled the air that lichens cannot grow here. It is hopeless to look for lichens for miles around Manchester and you will scarcely find any in Ipswich itself. I have found scanty patches of some crustaceous ones on a low wall in Christchurch Park, but that I suppose is screened by the trees overhead—there are none on my garden wall—a suitable habitat. But what a joy it is to go into the depths of the New Forest and be swept by Alectorias a yard or more long hanging from the branches of trees and see Usneas not so long and others of bushy habitat along the branches. You can see them in many old woodlands and in younger plantations too, but new housing estates nearby will soon put an end to them.


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Few Lichens Left by Suffolk Naturalists' Society - Issuu