A few years ago, my husband and I spent some time in Western Europe and stayed at the home of a local amateur botanist. In one of our numerous trips through the village, she showed a beautiful small plant with polluted leaves and called it lung. Being from the mountains of the western Oregon, I had a “wait, what?!” moment lung In my part of the world is a lichen that grows in the tendon of old growth forests. Pulmonary officinalis Is the lung I met in Europe, and Lobaria oregana Is the lung I grew up with with – two botanicals in different dramatically sharing the same common name.
