Art by Alice Tangerini: Lecanora sp.

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.

Alice Tangerini drew this graphite on film drawing of a lichen, Lecanora sp., for Mason Hale in November 1977. Her use of the polymer pencils started by following Jack Schroeder’s drawings of lichens and Eupatoriae in the early 1970s. Most of Tangerini’s original lichen drawings for Hale’s How to Know the Lichens, a Pictured Key Nature Series (Wm. C. Brown Company Publishers, 1979) have been missing since publication. Lecanora sp. was supposed to have been described as a new species but was never published. Mason delivered the Lecanora specimen to Tangerini in a petri dish with no collection data provided. His instructions on drawing the lichen thallus were “to make it look exactly like the specimen” and “do not try to reconstruct it”. The hope was that the drawing could be matched in the future with a digital image of the specimen. Wading through hundreds of undescribed digital images of lichens, however, might be a chore for another specialist.