Natural Art

Day 65: As a scientist, I am always picking things up to get a closer look, maybe using a magnifier, sometimes even nicking a small sample for examination under the microscope. However, that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate natural art when I find it. While most of Mother Nature's handiwork seems rather random to the human aesthetic sense, occasionally she elects to bridge the gap with something more to our tastes: balanced arrangements, colours which compliment one another, mixtures of visually appealing textures, etc. Admittedly, sometimes the line between science and art is blurry, and in those cases, I nearly always allow the right brain its moment of appreciation before permitting my analytical tendencies to dominate. In this particular instance, I'd been looking closely at a specimen of fungus, but when I raised my head and noticed this fragment of lichen (Evernia prunastri) perfectly laid out on a bed of decaying cottonwood leaves, science took a back seat. Its dichotomously branched lobes were artfully displayed, as if to illustrate the definition of the term on its page in the living encyclopedia of the forest.