Bryter Layter

Low cloud presses the landscape into homogenous murk. Wind-scoured branches are bare. But colour radiates. It bewitches me. Fluorescent ochre, egg-yolk, sage and verdigris lichen drapes trees from trunk to tip of twig and encrusts the lid of my nearest dog waste bin. 

Thanks to Channel 4's Wild Things and Gardener's Question Time this week I learned that the yellow lichen in my pictures indicates high levels of nitrogen. And I found an interesting page at the Natural History Museum where you can watch a video and take part in a clean air survey.

Lichens are symbiotic organisms; each specimen is a combination of a fungus and an alga. They are good indicators of air quality as they grow extremely slowly. This xanthoria parientina thrives on the pollution from the intensive Cambridgeshire agriculture. But they light up February.

                                                                            All photos by Jo Sinclair