Donald Culross Peattie
An Almanac for Moderns
excerpt from entry for “October Twentieth”
There is the utmost charm about collecting lichens for a hobby. Nothing is easier to press and mount. And there is an exquisite fragrance that lingers around even a venerable lichen herbarium, that calls back every mind with any nose for Nature at all — to days of emerald delight in the rainy woods of Maine where the long gray beards of Usnea sorrow over the sad dignity of old spruce boughs, or to sun-bitten, frost-tended rocks above the tree line on Mt. Washington. Or to the tundras of Lapland and the jungles of Surinam, if you happen to have been there!
and the prose itself like a preserved fragrance carries us away
And so for day 2869
20.10.2014