#natrualist

Parmotrema hypoleucinum

Lacy powdered-ruffle lichen

"Lacy powdered-ruffle" makes me think this lichen would be really trendy during the 18th-century. Join me in celebrating P. hypoleucinum as the anachronistic fashion icon it is! This temperate-tropical foliose lichen grows on the trees and shrubs (and very rarely rock) in open woodlands, forest edges, and swamps. It has thick, rigid main lobes which have a pale green or gray upper surface, white lower surface that blackens toward the lobe center, and lobe margins dotted with white soralia and black cilia. These main lobes alternate with thinner, strap-shaped, lacey lobes lacking soralia and cilia. I love that P. hypoleucinum accessorizes!

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Pannaria lurida

Wrinkled shingle lichen

You wanna know why I love lichens? Why I really love lichens? It's cause they're weird. Absolute weirdos. Total freaks of nature. And I think, inside all of us, we also think we're totally weird. And so we can relate to these little symbiotic mutants. When they're like, "hey, I'm gonna look like a leaf, but I'm not a plant. And I'm not just a fungi. I am indescribably. Also I want to be gray. With red spots. And really wrinkly. Deal with." Like, yes girl. You do you. #goals. And P. lurida was so obsessed with being unique and odd that it is actually divided into 3 subspecies: subsp. lurida, subsp. russellii, and subsp. quercicola. Which like, I feel so hard. Honestly the me I am in a big group vs the me I am around my conservative family vs the me I am at home with my cats might as well be three different subspecies, they are so different. Basically what I am trying to say is that I admire these little oddballs, these anomalies we get to share the planet with. And maybe it's because *I* also feel totally unique and variable and different, and isn't that the most common thing of all?

images: source | source | source