At the time of writing this, it has been wet for 45 consecutive days. I have walked the woods and hills of Shropshire every one of those 45 days. While it has been tempting to hide my face from the rain and head for home, the scent of the wet woods and the vibrant, electric greens have drawn me in. The closer I looked, the more I saw; a mini jungle of shapes, colours and self-similar fractals. I had intended this blog to be about the relationship between trees and mycelium, but I have been sidetracked by the rain and the fungi, moss and lichen that have bloomed so wildly all around me.

As my eyes began to focus on the myriad patterns and complexities, my mind started to wander into the past, the future, up to the stars and into the quantum. I thought about the origin of the universe and the evolution of the tiny wonders that surround me. What impact did they have on the planet? What impact did they have on the ancient hills and woodlands before ‘civilisation’ disturbed the weather patterns and damaged the air and soil? What is our relationship with these organisms today? Are we hurting them? Are they helping us?

Firstly, what exactly are we talking about? The blooms that surround me belong to three separate cryptogam organisms. Moss - a bryophyte plant that drinks in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen. Lichen - a symbiotic partnership of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria that inhale pollutants and exhale pure oxygen. Fungi - eukaryotic organisms that inhale oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide and store carbon in a deep, subterranean vault of mycelium roots.

To understand where they and we came from, we need to go back to the progenitor of all these organisms: the microscopic wonder called cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria are the ancient architects of our atmosphere. They invented photosynthesis roughly 2.4 billion years ago and flooded the, then toxic, Earth with the very first breaths of oxygen.

Thanks to cyanobacteria, and a billion years of transformation, fungi began to develop. Fungi are our planet's veterans; their origins lay in the primeval muck of the ancient oceans. Long before the first green shoot ever broke the surface, these eukaryotic pioneers were developing the thread-like mycelium that would eventually cover the earth.

As the world matured, so did the fungi. Imagine the world before trees: a rocky, barren landscape where fungi were the giants. Some ancient fungi, like the Prototaxites, stood nearly 8 metres tall in a world with no competition for the skyline. These pioneers built the underground infrastructure that allowed the first plant roots to thrive in a harsh, rocky world, grinding down stone into the very first soils. Without their work, the arrival of plants and trees would have been impossible.

After 500 million years, with the help of the developing mycelium network, the first mosses began to leave the sea and cling to bare rocks and what an impact they had. During the Ordovician Period, around 485 to 443 million years ago, these tiny pioneers were so efficient at eating atmospheric carbon and breaking down minerals that they actually shifted the planet's temperature and triggered an ice age.

This ice age lasted around 2 million years until the Silurian thaw, when cyanobacteria and fungi began to work together to form the first lichens. This prehistoric nuptial allowed these little oxygen factories to colonise the most brutal corners of the planet.

Lichen is perhaps nature's most beautiful natural glitch. It is not a single plant, but a sophisticated, symbiotic marriage between a fungus and an alga. They can go into a slumber during a drought and awaken the second the rain touches them. They lack roots and a protective cuticle, they are therefore forced to inhale the atmosphere in its entirety, including pollutants.

For time immemorial, fungi, moss and lichen have been integral to the world’s progression. For example, during the Carboniferous period (359 to 299 million years ago), trees grew so successfully that they nearly smothered the planet. Nothing could rot them because the complex polymer called lignin in the cell walls could not be destroyed. The Earth was buried under mountains of dead wood that refused to decay, locking away the planet's carbon and threatening to starve the atmosphere. It was the fungi that finally evolved the specialised enzymes called white rot, needed to dismantle lignin. By learning how to digest wood, fungi ended that era, recycled the carbon and prevented the world from becoming a permanent timber graveyard.

Over millions of years moss, lichen and the mycelium network continued to thrive and keep the atmosphere and carbon levels in check. The dinosaurs came and went (252 to 66 million years ago), the earth as we know it began to emerge and then humans evolved (approximately 1.9 million years ago). Since the Industrial Revolution (only 200 to 300 hundred years ago), we’ve pumped so much carbon into the air that atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than it was in 1750. While the "pea-soup" smogs of the 19th and 20th centuries have cleared, they have been replaced by the invisible pollution of the 21st. Once again, the cryptogams are trying to keep everything in balance, but we are testing them to their limits.

Fungi are the planet's ultimate biological filters. In the soil, they are the lead actors in mycoremediation, unlocking the chemical bonds of petroleum, pesticides and even some plastics. They are incredibly adept at sequestering heavy metals like lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic, locking these toxins away in their "fruit" to clean the soil for the trees. Some scientists even believe fungal enzymes utilise quantum tunnelling to break down the toughest bonds of the earth. Quantum tunnelling is a process where subatomic particles hop through physical barriers that should be impossible to cross, and research suggests fungi may use this at the molecular level to drive the rapid transport of nutrients across their membranes more efficiently than classical biology alone can explain. 

(This is a Turkey Tail mushroom, (Trametes Versicolor) a bracken fungus).

Moss is equally heroic, acting as a living, static-electric "hoover" for our atmosphere. Because moss leaves are negatively charged, they act like a magnet for the positively charged soot, dust and heavy metal particulates that float in our air. Once these particles are trapped in the moss’s dense, velvety embrace, specialised microbes on the moss’s surface go to work. They eat the nitrogen oxides and convert them into harmless biomass.

The engineering of moss is mind-blowing. A single square metre of moss provides a surface area thirty times its actual size. This massive, complex surface area allows it to act as a sophisticated air-scrubber that never needs its filter changed. On a square-metre-for-square-metre basis, a lush carpet of moss can sequester more carbon per year than mature forest canopy. It is a dense, green engine of purification, quietly stripping toxins from the air and exhaling the oxygen-rich air that sustains us.

(This is a Cypress-leaved Plait-moss (Hypnum Cupressiforme).

Lichens, meanwhile, are our most sensitive barometers. Because they absorb everything directly from the air, they are the first to suffer when sulphur dioxide or nitrogen levels rise. A wood draped in lichen is a biological certificate of pure air. If the lichen vanishes, this canary in the mine warns us that the air quality has failed. But they aren't just passive victims. They are active, microscopic janitors. Lichens possess an incredible ability to trap and lock away atmospheric pollutants, from sulphur and nitrogen oxides to heavy metal particulates like lead and copper, within their body. They essentially eat the pollution of our modern world, pulling these harmful elements out of the sky and binding them into their cell walls where they can no longer circulate in the wind we breathe.(This is a Foliose lichen (Parmotrema Perlatum).) 

.Lichen is so resilient that when samples were exposed to the vacuum and intense radiation of open space on the International Space Station, they remained metabolically active.

Yet, we actively wage a war against all of them. Our obsession with ‘clean’ paths, sanitised streets and perfect lawns saturated with weedkillers and insecticides creates a sterile desert. This desire to control and sterilise nature is reckless and myopic. When we destroy these habitats for a uniform patch of green, we crack the carbon vault, releasing all that stored history back into the atmosphere.

Before you reach for that weedkiller or jet wash, walk among these mosses, lichen and fungi. Know that you are walking through a living map of our history and our potential. These organisms are so much part of our weather system that they help create the rain and help to manage it. By releasing millions of spores into the sky, they provide the tiny seeds around which raindrops form. When heavy rains fall, these organisms act as a natural sponge by absorbing up to twenty times their weight in water, significantly slowing the flow into our rivers and preventing downstream flooding.

Yet again, we are testing them to their limits. For every 1°C the atmosphere warms, the air can hold about 7% more water vapour. This is the reason our drizzle has turned into deluge. We have upgraded the sky’s carrying capacity. So, while the forest provides the seeds for the rain, climate change is providing a much larger bucket. The fungi and mosses are evolved for the steady, predictable rhythms of the seasons, but they are now being asked to process a volume of water and a pace of change that is unprecedented in the last 3 million years.

From the ancient cyanobacteria that first taught the world to breathe, to the fungal networks that may yet use quantum secrets to heal our poisoned soils, these organisms are the true bridge between the stardust we came from and the future we are building. We are all part of this vast, circular economy of the stars.

We are on a precipice....but it's not too late. By protecting our local woodlands and embracing the wild, unperfect beauty of nature, we aren't just saving the scenery, we are honouring a billion-year-old legacy. We are keeping the vault closed, the air clean and the connection to the quantum heart of the forest alive.

Keep it wild, keep it green and protect our planet. Next time it rains, look around and be part of the past, the future, the stars and the quantum.