Beatrix Potter's Favorite Pets

After scrolling through the photos, I trust you are as much in love with lichens as Beatrix Potter was. What, you didn’t know? You don’t mean the Peter Rabbit lady? Yes, that lady.

Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) grew up loving dogs, her pet rabbits, Benjamin and Peter—and fungi. And she liked painting them. Lichens, especially, fascinated her. In fact, she was one of the first people to suggest that lichens were some sort of symbiotic organisms. But no one believed her because she was a female. No EEOC in Victorian England!

So Bea’s career as a professional lichenologist was over before it began.

Potter version 2.0: writer and illustrator of children’s stories—Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, et al—earning her a more handsome income than lichens would ever have afforded her.

Nevertheless, Ms. Potter’s early adventures with the crusty symbionts helped awaken science’s interest in one of creation’s most fascinating phenomena—no thanks to Darwin. You see, at the time, any suggestion that nature could involve cooperation, rather than bloody competition and survival of the fittest was, well—anti-Darwinian. Now we know better—than Charlie D., that is.

A lichen is not, after all, a single organism; it’s a marriage of two or even three totally different organisms living as one cooperative household and creating what amounts to a new and identifiable species—in fact thousands of species, depending on the combinations of single organisms involved. The symbiotic cooperation involves the fact that one partner, an alga, is autotrophic—green—photosynthetic—makes food, while the other, a fungus, is heterotrophic—needs an external food source—but is good at soaking up available water and dissolving rocks to get minerals.

The alga-fungus combination, therefore, can live where neither partner could comfortably live separately. As you can see by the photos, that means on rocks and tree trunks—or even on frozen tundra soil. It’s a great arrangement. The biologists are not nearly as cooperative with each other and keep quarreling about words like parasitism, commensalism and mutualism with regard to lichens. Guess what? The lichens couldn’t care less. They just do what lichens do—cooperate to survive.

And survive they do. Their biomass exceeds that of all the life in the oceans, not primarily due to the rather skimpy examples we have in New Jersey, but because of the extensive ground cover they provide in northern climes, like the arctic tundra—good reindeer food and good medicine for natives of the area.

We can learn a lot from the lichens, about cooperation, of course, but also about living on a rock. Not just about the mundane life on the “third rock from the Sun,” but about living on The Rock—The Son.

A little Bible meditation will give you a break from my pitiful prose and offer something of eternal value. (I’ve made it easy by providing a “click-on” version—but real men and women will also want to crack open the paper version to read the verses in their contexts.)

Let’s start with my life verses: Psalm 40:1-3 (Actually, He waited—and grabbed me when He was ready—I usually don’t wait patiently for anything.) And by the way, salvation is one event in which there is no cooperative effort. God does it all. Man-made religions always want us to think that we can help. Biblical Christianity is the only non-“Hamburger Helper” faith.

And a few more to click on and mull over: Matthew 7:24; 1 Corinthians 10:4; and most certainly Psalm 18:2;

Finally, as the name of our pioneer lichenologist should remind us, God is the ultimate Potter—we are clay in His hands. And He will mold us into vessels for His ultimate glory and honor—something certainly much more than a crusty patch on an inert boulder.

Soli Deo Gloria