scene_again | And now for something a little different.... (Reply)

My f-list have put up apparently cheerfully with being pic-spammed with photographs of my travels and of flowers galore. Now for something a little different!

Since I've had my little camera with the macro button, I find increasingly that I am looking more closely at things and finding things of beauty and interest in all sorts of unexpected places. Flowers, insects, cats, all grist to my mill and my macro button!

One of the things I have been noticing more and more is how many lichens there are in my area. I seem to remember being told that lichens are a very primitive form of growth - not quite a moss but certainly one of our earliest forms of growth. I'm sure I read somewhere that they were around when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth.

I noticed that there were quite a lot of lichens in the churchyard, on gravestones particularly. This is quite common, apparently. Lichens grow best - and very slowly - in pure air, and where they are not disturbed. So country churchyards are a great habitat for them. That is where I found this one

which is the first lichen I took a photograph of. It's big - about six inches across! And surprisingly pretty in a lacy sort of way! A bit like a doily! Doily, Pros-girls, a lace doily, don't get excited!
Then I started to notice lichens in other places - on an old bench under a tree

, on a spar of wood on a broken down old litter bin

, along the top of the steel gate

to the car park, on the posting box on the churchyard wall

, on a branch of our winter-flowering cherry

in the garden - some of these are enlarged, taken with the macro lens - this branch is about half an inch across! They have a curious beauty of their own, I think, considering most people would see them as a sign of decay.
Yesterday I drove to the edge of the town, because I wanted some shots of the woods, just out in full leaf and looking stunning - here they are, complete with sheep and lambs.

More lambs? Ok, here you go -

Yes, I know, aaaaah! Happy now? Good, now - back to the strange stuff.

I wandered over the road and down to a field gate to take a picture of a pond at the bottom of the field. Well, yes,alright - if you really must,

One field pond complete with rushes, which look for all the world like fence palings!
And then I took a picture of the gate,

because it was a bit decrepit and - well characterful, I suppose! And I expect you've already guessed what I saw when I looked a bit closer! Yes, moss (with sporophytes! That 's the bits growing out of the top.

You learn something every day, you see! Even if you don't want to.)and oh, yes, - lichen!

No, no - don't go to sleep, there's more!

Almost all of the following photographs are worth viewing larger - well, I would think that, wouldn't I?
Edit: A lot but not all of these photographs are uploaded via my Flickr account and if you click on them to enlarge they take you to that photo on my Flickr page. You can enlarge that picture by clicking on the "All sizes" button above the photo - it really is a big version you see then! (Do feel free to browse around the rest of my Flickr photostream if you are interested!) On the ones I uploaded direct into this post, via LJ, you get my LJ scrapbook image which again can be viewed large by clicking on it once or, for larger still, twice.

I noticed that some of the lichen was quite thick and looked sort of crusted,

and there were bits sticking up! so I looked a bit harder at the gate post .

Which really was more decrepit than I had realised. But it was absolutely crammed with lichens and mosses. Look! Here is the top of the gatepost itself

And here is the bit next to the gatepost in profile,

so you can see the little trumpety things. And these two are enlargements of sections of the gatepost pictures above -

Again, if you can enlarge them, (each of these pictures covers no more than a two inch length of the top rail.) it is quite extraordinary to see the number of apparently different lichens and mosses colonising this old length of timber, hidden away in plain view of the passing world roaring past at 50mph!

And I felt a real sense of wonder to think that - at least until I shared this with the world through Lj and Flickr - I was almost certainly the only person in the world who knew that all this was there.

So there you have it! The full gamut of my eccentricity laid bare - the woman who takes photographs - lots of them at that, of a rotting old farm gate! But I don't care - I love it!

Thank you to those who have stuck it out this far - and it was different, wasn't it? Ok. back to flowers and scenery in future!

And here's one of the evening sky