Lovely Lovely Words

We've been doing some interesting work on plant colonization of bare greensand slopes and banks at a particular Island site. In part this is to show how use of no herbicides at all in weed control and no imported topsoil or fertilizer in the management of the bits and pieces of left over land in and around a busy industrial site can work with the regular disturbance regime that inevitably operates in such a place to produce very good overall biodiversity. So long as we can prize people away from that desperate corporate urge to tidy and pointlessly prettify everything the world will be a far more biologically interesting place. This doesn't mean a puritanical drive to expel all non-native species and indeed some of the most exciting places have a real mix of casual and naturalized species in with regeneration from a seed bank left to just get on with things without having a ton of bark and soil improver dumped on it. Anyway, amongst the great things to see in such places (loads at the site we're surveying where this photo was taken) is this lovely carpet of the lichen Cladonia pixydata with the many little archangel trumpets, properly called podetia. Has there ever been a more beautiful word than pixydata - the statistical information essential to students of the fairyfolk: longevity, global distribution, average family size, diet, major exports, language and dialect, all questions I now of course can't get out of my head. But it gets better. This lichen is classed as a squamulose species, meaning that its surface is made up of loads of tiny scales. Another spectacularly brilliant word. Forget Om Nama Shivaya, my mantra is now Squamulose Cladonia Pyxidata and I feel much better for it.