Strange Beauty
In the drabness of November you take color wherever you can find it.
By Richard Grant, Photography by Jim Block
I felt a quickening of hope for the Republic when a friend told me that these days lichens are hip. Everyone who's building a stone wall has got to have them. And everyone is building a stone wall.Now lichens, at first blush, would seem improbable objects of passion for the home-and-garden cognoscenti. These curious, sometimes grotesque symbiotes hang out in rough neighborhoods where more refined species fear to tread. Shady boulders, wind-blasted cliffs, rotting wood, and spooky old tombstones -- few spots on Earth have not been colonized by one sort of lichen or another.
