Well I meant to get this posted for the Fourth of July, but you can move the clock back for a day to imagine my patriotic alert about the British Redcoats.  This is a fruiting lichen that has taken hold of a fence post in the yard.  It’s quite small (think of miniature match sticks) but within this tiny world is incredible complexity.  The lichen is a marriage between an alga and fungus that succeeds through cooperation at the most basic level.  Both are required before you see the little red caps that release the fungus spores.  You can see how the brilliant red gave them their nickname harking back to the american revolution. They are also known as matchstick moss or red crested lichen.  I’ve been wrestling with how to photograph all the detail at this level and this is best I’ve come up with so far.
We have had wonderful weather for the fourth of July holiday, almost unprecedented. Â It’s inspired some really lovely flowering around the yard.
We get seedlings now from Prairie Sun that seem to have no trouble from year to year.
And a new daylily from Oakes.
And we have new seedling Corydalis in the greenhouse derived from Dufu Temple that is flowering from seeds planted in January.
Of course one does not live simply by photographing flowers.  We have been harvesting gallons of blueberries (about 8 gallons frozen so far this year).  This is yesterday’s pickings.
And we made blueberry ice cream for the fourth of July.
Yum…
The British would definitely be coming for blueberry ice cream..
The shots of the lichen are amazing!
Look at all those blueberries, are they all destined for muffins, pancakes, and morning cereal? We had enough last year for two breakfasts and that was it!
The lichen pictures came out great. What an interesting plant and strangely colorful for a lichen…. But I can never guess if they’re dead or not.