Coalition of the willing

Growing a rainforest takes time, ingenuity and passion.Oh, and a bit of dragon skin. Danny Graham meets the people fighting to save Scotland's rare habitats

- Danny Graham

Incised and contorted, a sea of scales the colour of leaf smoke stretches as far as the eye can see. Between the chaos of angles there are deep, shadowy rifts, each as mysterious as the next.The whole thing reeks of decay, of something ancient and forgotten and...

"It's magnificent," a voice whispers. I look up to see a man standing beside me, one eye squinting, the other pressed against a tiny hand lens trained on the trunk of a twisted oak tree. There are others in the forest, too, each figure straddling its own trunk. I'm suddenly aware of how strange we must all look.

But Oliver Moore - a lichen and bryophyte specialist for Plantlife Scotland - doesn't seem to mind at all. "It's called dragon skin," he says, beckoning the others to come and join, though his eyes never leave the dry mass of frills on the tree. "It's what makes this place a rainforest. People think it's the trees, but it's not really, it's lichens like thisRicasolia virens-and mosses and liverworts, of course."

We're standing in the middle of the Scottish Wildlife Trust's Rahoy Hills Wildlife Reserve, a fragment of coastal temperate rainforest way out on the Morvern peninsula in the West Highlands of Scotland. September sunlight fades through the broken canopy and somewhere beyond the piles of russet bracken, moss mounds and butter-yellow chanterelles, a river gushes.

Oliver reaches into his rucksack, pulls out a bottle and unscrews the lid. "Now, watch closely," he whispers, pouring a trickle of water over the lichen. By now, we're all intoxicated; breaths held, heads slowly tilting closer to the action. And then it happens. Almost in an instant the lichen transforms from a dusky olive to a startling shade of green. "It's alive," Oliver grins. "Isn't it magical?"