Beauty shines forth in so many places and things. But I wonder who else sees beauty in lichen, apart from lichenologists and reindeer, that is? And me.
Dogged, with teeth-gritting determination, ekeing nourishment from barren cracks and crevices and bringing life and colour to wintry ledges, lichen are the mininmalists of plant music, the extreme athletes of extremophiles, to mix a few metaphors. These qualities alone fill me with wonder, but it's the variety and patterns of lichens that paint the thousand words I feel. Colonies of tiny white discs with little indentations in the middle - a little like corpuscles - flatten themselves against rock surfaces, others tuft and crackle from a central point and form knobs and cups on the ends of brittle death-grey stalks, still others radiate like pressed flowers of gold and ocre.
Lichen clings to gravestones and ancient standing stones - in the midst of death there is life, to rephrase the Book of Common Prayer - and their grey-green wisps tuft dryly on fence-posts, like bristles on a witch's nose. On more sheltered ledges and crannies, varieties of species nestle, forming little garden communities - if octopuses had gardens on land, I'm sure they'd be lichen gardens, as the sea creatures would feel right at home amongst the coralescent textures that spike forth.
Their communities celebrate the struggle for survival - to survive they need nourishment and they can live alone, but they thrive in the company of others. And while belonging is positive, it isn't necessarily easy. There's tension at the edges of our spaces - a bristling neighbour, a spiky friend, a flat and sullen acquaintance - but together we survive and thrive, we shine forth and 'spike forth', like lichen.
All of the images were taken on Orkney last April. The standing stone is at the Ring of Brodgar on the 'mainland' (main island), while the octopus' gardens are on North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island of the group.
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