Lawrence Millman I


f flowers are commonly placed on a loved one’s final resting place, why shouldn’t lichens be allowed to


reside on that loved one’s gravestone? After all, a lichen on a gravestone occupies a branch on the tree of life considerably closer to the branch occupied by that loved one than, say, a chrysanthemum, especially an artificial chrysanthemum. Plus, that lichen could


42 FUNGI Volume 14:4 Fall 2021


have an esthetic quality similar to an attractive mosaic. Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge,


Massachusetts, has a plenitude of gravestones, some of which host a plenitude of lichens. North-, south-, east-, and west-facing gravestones host different lichen species. So do granite, marble, limestone, and sandstone gravestones. Some of these lichens are typical inhabitants of trees who’ve decided it mightn’t be a bad idea to


inhabit a rock surface for a change. As I was walking around Mt. Auburn’s


capacious plot of land (174 acres), I noticed quite a few gravestones that weren’t hosting lichens. Why was this? Because fertilizers as well as automotive exhaust can result in a nitrification of a lichen’s habitat, and many lichen species (the large rosettes of Flavoparmelia caperata, as shown in the above photo, being an exception) don’t have the ability to deal with such pollutants. Likewise,


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76