Another #Cladonia saga out of the calcareous grasslands of Aston Rowant in Oxfordshire. Find once again courtesy of @judyweb32049878. Warning: unresolved ending ahead. Though I hope the utterly weird beauty of this #Iichen will make up for it.
Let's go:
First off, let's give our attention to the feature that is screaming out to be noticed. The wine-glass shaped stalks ('pixie cup' podetia) of this #lichen are tiered, with the young stalks proliferating from the rims of the older cups. Like crooked turrets on a Tim Burton castle.
In this specimen, these stalks grow huddled together, forming up to 3 tiers in places and evoking a fantastical landscape - somewhere between a haunted forest and an ancient stratified city.
Like Max Ernst landscape meets Breugel's Tower of Babel.
Maybe.
Ok, enough getting sidetracked. Next feature!
This Cladonia has squamules! Small leafy scales that grow from the lichen's body. The squamules on mine are incised and they're mostly concentrated around the cups of the larger, more mature stalks - especially around the rims.
Now there is a Cladonia that is famous for its squamules. It's name is Cladonia squamosa. And one of its variants turns yellow under the persuasion of potassium hydroxide (K)...
And looks at that, so does mine!
However, I have some problems with this ID.
First, C. squamosa's pixie cups are meant to be perforated. My cups don't have holes in them.
Second, C. squamosa is characterised by the absence of soredia. My Cladonia is covered in granules (not mentioned in C. squamosa descriptions) that could possibly be interpreted as soredia.
There is also some confusion about cup and stock dimensions that I've encountered in the keys. Will skip these for now and go onto a final doubt. Which is that, for a Cladonia famous for its squamules, this specimen doesn't seem to have nearly enough to earn the name 'squamosa'.
So if not C. squamosa, what is this lichen?
In the spirit of the whimsical beginning to this thread, I can stretch my imagination far enough to consider whether I've got a chemically rogue and uncharacteristically scaly C. chlorophaea.
Though...eh.
So I am officially sending out a distress call from this haunted forest/Tim Burton castle.
Help!
Respectfully,
-Michela
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