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