In winter, the forest forms a ochre horizon, mingling with the ploughed fields. The trees have become anonymous, the trunks silent, the branches pallid or blackened. It is during these days that the meagre light lightly touches and shows those humble beings to which we later on hardly pay attention anymore, when abundance becomes common place and masks the discreteness.
Let us go closer to the trees and take a look at the trunks. Touches of gray, or green or yellow are spread out over the bark.

These are lichen, original living beings, born from the marriage of a algae and a mushroom. The capabilities coming forth from this alliance permitted them to conquer nearly every habitat. In winter lichen are supple and soft, dry and brittle in summer. Nevertheless they survive this dehydration, regaining their suppleness as of the first rain.During those gray days, the only light and colour comes the soil, from those green cushions formed by the soft and thick moss
Lichen and mosses do not posses vessels canalising their sap, nor real roots or flowers, they are the first multicellular organisms to have conquered firm land. They have attached themselves to the naked rocks of a barren world, and slowly eroded them to the first layers of soil. There, bit by bit, the other plants could settle once appeared, the fern, the conifer, and finely the flowering plants from the buttercup over the oak and the palm tree, to couch grass. From this long gone era they retained their taste for the extreme. That is why we find them encrusted, hanging or glued, in the shade or the sun, from very hot to very cold, on trunks, rocks, naked soil, walls, roofs and even on windows and plastic. There are not many habitats where you will not find lichen, often joined by mosses.
However, they fear certain forms of atmospheric pollution, that is why we saw their  nearly total disappearance from certain towns, from their suburbs, or from the vicinity of some industrial zones. If a habitat turns out to be rich in lichen of all kinds, one can deduce that it is little or not  polluted. That is what one can think of while walking through our forests, observing all the different forms taken by the lichen which cover the trees, the small walls, which spread over the earth and settle themselves on the mosses , and… on other lichens.

The old walls, covered with mosses and lichen, also host ferns. Some of them are small. Some among them are also able to  support difficult conditions, that is why we can find them for instance on stones, in the direct sunshine.
That one there, somewhat larger, the polypode, can be found between the roots of trees, and even in the forks of their branches. In colder places, this fern can accompany the lichen on its way up and settle somewhere on vertical trunks.Certain stems, sunken to the earth, are the rests of a large fern which is quite frequent in these woods, and their borders: the bracken. Soon, we will be able to see them, the shoots of this fern, pale, small, downy crosiers.
Of course, talking about forests, the mushrooms grow out of bounds and end by covering up the forest. Although they remain discrete during this season, one only has to scrape away some of the dead leafs covering the earth, in order to notice some whitish filamentous accumulations, there are our mushrooms, working.
Those filaments decompose, in order to recycle it,  that what we walk on; in them we encounter an aspect of a wild and invisible life, which takes place in the soil if this does not suffer chemical or mechanical aggression. There, in the darkness crunching, clinking, hissing, gurgling make up the framework of combinations between the bites of invisible insects or spiders, and the saliva of worms, the secretions  of bacteria, the slime of mushrooms, the mucus of roots.

All this mingles under our feet without respite or rest. Of this “kitchen” we only see a negligible part: the mushrooms (more his spore carrier) which we gather, the orchids, but also the trees, the plants that we eat, the flowers we pick. Their germination, their health, their continued existence depends on this secret kitchen.
The soil is not an inert substrate, it is a thick “soup” filled with minuscule life which conditions life on our planet. So is there really living soil, which can be considered to be of little value, while the pressure of human needs demands more and more space to settle himself and soil to grow his food.