On 12th February 2009, I planted a seedling, the Darwin Bicentennial Oak, in a corner of my garden to mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Over the years, I’ve posted regular photographic updates on the tree’s progress. As I keep joking, I‘m slowly gathering material for the longest ever time-lapse movie.
Inspired by this unplanned but surprisingly satisfying long-term project, on 30 August 2025, I took a photograph of a lichen near my favourite Anglesey rock. My intention was to re-photograph the lichen on subsequent visits to see how it changes over time.
Were lichens capable of perception and thought, they would think we humans live reckless, mayfly lives, being born, developing and dying in the blink of an eye. From our viewpoint, lichens seem to spend forever just continuing to be there: existing, but never changing. In reality, they’re getting on with the business of living their symbiotic lives, albeit at a far less hurried pace than we can perceive. It will be interesting to monitor my chosen lichen in slow-time.
When I first announced my lichen timelapse project, I compared lichen to coral atolls, which they superficially resemble, and which also form incredibly slowly. I subsequently came across two other lichen descriptions by women writers which pleased me immensely:
Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photographs of it taken yesterday. Some lichens are similar. Botanists have measured some ordinary lichens twice, at fifty-year intervals, without detecting any growth at all. And yet their cells divide; they live.
–Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.–Elizabeth Bishop, The Shampoo
Lichens as nebulae, and as still explosions… I wish I could write as well as that!
Anyway, here are the photographs I’ve collected so far:
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