Collection by Jaime Gillin
World's First Lichen Garden?
Last spring, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art unveiled its new 14,000-square foot rooftop sculpture garden, spangled with works by Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith. To a casual visitor, the space—with its wooden benches, dark stone walls, and cult Blue Bottle Coffee kiosk—looked minimalist but complete. It wasn't. Last week, CMG Landscape Architecture added their long-awaited finishing touch: a cultivated (and nearly microscopic) ‘lichen garden,’ possibly the world’s first. I joined them on a sunny Wednesday to help with the installation, and document the process.
Some of the specimens were collected from art patron (and SFMOMA board member) Steve Oliver's sculpture ranch in Sonoma. The landscape architects thought it would be auspicious to start with some lichen that was already "art-friendly." Soon after they collected the samples, they heard that a crew had spent years cleaning lichen off Mt. Rushmore—"Oh man, we missed that opportunity!" lamented Milliken.
Lichen is a pioneer organism that thrives where nothing else can—arctic tundra, hot deserts, rocky coasts and toxic slag heaps, for example. Lichen is intolerant of pollutants; in some European cities, they put lichen stones on rooftops and monitor its health to gauge air quality, mapping what they call "lichen islands."