On my travels in South America in 2022, I arrived almost at the tip of the continent, at Punta Arenas, a port town on the Strait of Magellan, in the wild lands of Patagonia. In the 1800’s, Charles Darwin spent time there too when the ship he was travelling on, the HMS Beagle, used it as a base for expeditions to Tierra del Fuego.

That was clear when I travelled to visit my first Patagonian nature reserve, Reserva Nacional Magallanes, and saw Nothofagus trees with golf-ball shaped orange fungal parasites. I found that these are known as “pan de indio”, “Indian bread”, because they are part of the diet of the indigenous community of the region, the Yámana people. The scientific name of the fungus is Cyttaria darwinii, and I later saw Darwin’s original specimen who now lives in the Fungarium at Kew Gardens.

This painting features the orange fungus littering the forest floor as I wave “hola” to the wise old men of the trees, with their beards of lichen, ““barba de viejos”, “old man’s beard”, Usnea spp..

Fine liner pen and watercolour.