Day 14: Roughly 14 lichenologists with varying degrees of expertise from beginner to professor gathered this morning on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill for a field trip among the fog-wrapped gravestones of Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. Mt. Pleasant is one of the oldest cemeteries in Seattle (and for my east-coast friends, that means some of the people buried here were born in the early to mid-1800s), and unfortunately most of the headstones have been kept remarkably lichen-free. Even so, we found several dozen different species (small colonies for the most part) of Parmelia, Hypogymnia, Chrysothrix and others. My favourite was a relatively uncommon lobed Lecanora which I'll feature in an upcoming post. This ancient horse chestnut tree was a veritable gold-mine despite its rather barren appearance on first glance. Used to the lush and verdant lichens which festoon the trees in Mount Rainier's lower forests, I was amazed to discover a whole new world of micro-lichens beneath my hand lens. Even though I didn't learn anything new with respect to identifying individual species, my eyes were opened to the wealth of nearly invisible lichens populating the urban environment.
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