Just     a bunch of little guys.    Hanging out.

[ID: two photos of small brown shelf fungus and lichens on a small dead tree.]

Gray Monday

25 Days:

  A gray day, but not a bad one. I got some necessary Christmas shopping done over the weekend (a chore I don’t enjoy) and got to work on a tiny bit of decorating today. I don’t decorate a lot, but putting some evergreens around the house is a good way to connect to childhood memories. One of the things my mother always collected at Christmas was crow’s foot.

[ID: Closeup of crows’ foot growing on the forest floor, scattered with dead leaves.]

   Crow’s foot is a clubmoss, one of those older-than-dinos kind of plants that used to rule the earth. More or less. My mother being the devoted naturalist that she was made sure we knew what they were and what they were NOT (any relation to pine trees).

   We have one section of them about twenty feet by ten up in the woods in a low, moist spot. It’s the only place on the property that they grow. I visited them today, walked in the woods, and thought Christmas thoughts. With dogs, of course.

[ID: one brown and one black dog rambling through winter woods, tails wagging steadily. The second picture shows a close up of several lichens and a little moss on a piece of dead wood.]

The chairs out back are getting old.

But it’s ok. We lichen like that.

Lichen rescue

   My late mother was an amateur naturalist. She was the sort who rehabbed wounded or orphan wild animals, gathered wild food, and adored plants from the tiniest lichens up to the biggest sycamore trees. She could id all the wild mushrooms, make a baby flying squirrel drink formula from an eyedropper, and get a hawk with a bullet wound to cooperate with his medical care. 

   So, when I found a pile of old split-rail fencing that had been entirely overgrown with lichens and moss, I thought of her. I’m trying to clean up almost five decades of mess, hoarding, and I’ll-get-around-to-it-someday STUFF at my father’s farm. The split rails probably had a purpose at one point. Now, however, the were half rotted and covered in the most abundantly growth of lichens I’ve ever seen. In honor of my mother, and also the dear person who writes @botanyshitposts, I carefully loaded the wood into the truck with the lichens unharmed, took them to the woods near my house, and placed them on the ground right inside the forest. Releasing them, as it were, into the wild.

   They can hang out there with the horsetails, crowsfoot, and other ancient plants, and just do their lichen-y thing.