Cryptogams of North Head

Nobody really talks about cryptogams these days. Cryptograms, yes, but not cryptogams. In the 19th century, cryptogams were the 'lower plants', the ones lacking flowers and seeds. Essentially, they were fungi, lichens, liverworts, mosses and hornworts, though others might also include the ferns. I will leave them out, but I will include the slime moulds, and I will throw in one bacterium. And one group of plants. The mosses can wait: nobody takes them to be fungi.

To be blunt, 'cryptogam' is just a polite way of saying odds and sods. This blog entry is mainly pictures: as I see it, even people who see and notice the ~500 wildflower species rarely notice the lower plants.

All of the things you read about here may (correctly or incorrectly) be thought of as fungus-related, and I am detailing them because I am about to introduce some youngsters to the fungi (and related life forms) of North Head. Having put this account together, I wanted to share my play space and its beautiful life forms.

Fungi.

Mushrooms and other visible fungi

This mauve mushroom turned up on the oval in April 2025. Not seen before or since. The 50-cent coins that show up are there as a scale: they are 32 mm from side to side, and each edge is 8 mm long.

The outside mushrooms were on the oval, the central one was in the Sanctuary compound.

Bracket fungi

These are typically found on dead timber, and they can be as much as 300 mm across. In dry weather, these may be the only genuine fungi you will see on North Head. There are very many of them.

Bracket fungi

 

Bracket fungi

Lichens

A lichen is complicated: we used to think they were a fungus and an alga, living in symbiosis, then people said it was helotism, a form of slavery, where the fungus exploited the alga, then there were two fungi, and now some people say there are three fungi!

At one stage, while I was writing The Nature of North Head, I discussed with a colleague the lack of lichens, and she agreed. Later, I found quite a few. If you want that book by the way, you can have it as a dead-tree book from Amazon, or as a Kindle e-book, but the version from Google Play is cheaper, and more up-to-date: get it here: it covers all of the wildlife, flowering plants, geology and much more.

Anyhow, we do indeed have lichens, and this one is only found on asphalt, I believe, and I have seen a very similar organism on a tar road in New Zealand: you can find it on the asphalt in the Sanctuary compound

There are also quite a few lichens on the Memorial Walk, and in our defence, the ones on the brick have all appeared since Jenny and I agreed that there were no lichens on the headland: we were wrong! (In fact, we were no more than 10 metres from some lichens as we discussed their absence

Lichens on the Memorial Walk.

There used to be other lichens on old timber, at the back of the lawn near the walk: I need to look to see if they are still there:

  Liverworts.

 I have never seen these growing wild, but they show up in our nursery, where we raise plants from seedlings and cuttings. The liverworts are like mosses, but they have things like leaves.

 Leptothrix.

Leptothrix is a bacterium, but many people have mistaken it for an oil slick or some sort of mould, meaning a fungus: the 'oil slick' shown below is actually a very thin layer of manganese, present in Sydney's Hawkesbury sandstone as a trace element. There is some deep biochemistry here, and some amazing physics.

Leptothrix is my favourite small organism, so here are two more of my shots:

 Slime moulds.

Look them up. They sometimes show up in our mulch heaps, and I include them here because as an undergraduate in botany, it was part of our mycology course.

There is some very deep science involved with these things, relating to quorum sensing. Look that up, as well. 

 

Orchids.

Hang about, those are plants with flowers and seeds, right? Yes, but orchids have no roots, but they have mycorrhizae, specialised fungi that live on the orchids and take food from other plants to feed them. Besides, I am a sucker for weird orchids:

Sun orchid, tongue orchid, bootlace orchid.

Bearded man, flying duck and donkey orchids, all three residents of the Third Quarantine Cemetery.