Fossil, Fungi & Gingci

What is amazing, other than the fact that life clings to anything, everything, it can - is that it can also announce itself with such vibrancy. Some things magically pull us closer with smell and shape, while others do it with color. This stone, an 'accidental' discovery beneath the canopy of an oak tree, is about the size of a bedroom pillow and, as you can see, is spangled with blooms of celadon lichen. In this case celadon is a color, that sublime shade of pale green that almost seems to glow, even when not in direct light. True Celadon was a type of Korean pottery that varied in color but which was typically lighter and less saturated. Over the centuries, it took on different hues as it was copied in Chinese glazes. The color is known in some Eastern cultures as Gingci and is created by the addiction of iron oxide in the clay or glaze.

The incredible bloom of lichen on this stone adds to its already organic shape to create something that appears to be wholly alive.  It might be a very old tortoise, or a mammoth Echinoderm, crawling slowly across the bottom of a Cambrian sea. The photograph itself offers what appears to be an optical illusion, in that it seems to move, when viewed in full screen at full resolution. It seems to throb. http://twitpic.com/4junu7/full This is a trick of the light and the lens; which is a wide angle and very close to the subject. In this view, the pitted surface of the gray stone is beautifully adorned by the bright, floral blooms of the lichen, like bouquets of green carnations on an old charcoal suit. 

Lichens exist in the harshest of environments, and are capable of long life. Yet they are fragile organisms susceptible to climate change and excess ozone. Delicate canaries in the coalmine of Earth, they are fascinating and ancient. A lichen is a composite organism - a fungus teamed up with an algae. And they have been around for more than 400 million years. The process by which a fungus takes on a photosynthetic partner is called Lichenization, and it is nothing short of miraculous. It boggles the mind to contemplate the machinations and happy accidents of nature. It is even more mind-boggling to contemplate the ignorance and blindness of man, who seems to learn nothing from fossils and fungi.

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