Ron’s Stroud Nature Notes. Ron Allen – 24 October 2024
Fungi (plus the aurora)
I am not sure when my interest in fungi started, the first of my books I can find (Collins Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools by Lange and Hora) on the shelf is dated in my handwriting 1970. My Observer’s Book of Mushrooms and Toadstools is 1977. Geoffrey Kibby’s Mushrooms and Toadstools was 1979.
Since those early days, we have come to learn so much more about fungi and just how complex their relationships and ecology really are. Martin Sheldrake’s 2021 ‘Entangled Life’, an inspirational read, brings us up to date on the strange lives of fungi.
Many fungi feed on rotting wood, while many more form the ‘wood wide web’ where their mass of underground filaments (hyphae together forming the mycelium), connect the roots of different trees allowing for exchange of nutrients and even chemical messages between trees (there is a summary on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-44643177); and, every autumn, throwing up their fruiting bodies for us to see.
Here are some notes on some of the fungi I have found over the years in Stroud and particularly our garden and photographs of some of them.
Many of the logs yet to be split in our garden are sprouting great masses of brown wood-rotting fungi but there are so many other different fungal types.
Toadstools with gills below their caps especially mushrooms and horse mushrooms (images 1 and 2) and shaggy parasols (image 3) along with the yellow or red capped russula species (image 4), pink rosy bonnets, boletes with pores under the cap, brackets that extend shelf-like structures from dead branches such as these Blushing Brackets (image 5), crust fungi waving across dead logs (image 6), and soft brown ear-shaped jelly fungus growing on dead elder stems and so many more.
1 Common mushroom.
2 Horse mushrooms.
3 Shaggy parasol.
4 Blackish-purple russula below our oak tree.
5 Blushing bracket on willow stem.
6 Hairy crusts on dead willow log.
In the days of cattle on our fields, giant puffballs were common, soft balls of white flesh splendid when sliced and fried with bacon (image 7). Now, our hazel stems produce false-puffballs, not really fungi at all, but a type of protozoan slime mould (image 8).
One day while going to post a letter I found an earthstar by our east Stroud letter box, never to be seen again (images 9 and 10) although I recently found one in our garden.
Our front garden once sprouted shaggy inkcaps (image 11) that decay to black ink and our back garden also has the common inkcap (image 12). Bright red circular elf-cups sprout out of green moss-covered logs (image 13) and one year we had the bright purple amethyst deceiver (image 14). A delight last year was a spread of eyelash fungi on our log pile, tiny 0.5-1cm scarlet red discs growing out of dead wood and fringed with a ring of black ‘eyelash’ hairs (image 15) and brown-haired white cups (image 16).
7 Giant puffball on cattle grazed grassland.
8 Amoeboid plasmodium of the False puffball on hazel.
9 Earth star alongside the Winchester Road (bottom left of pic).
10 Close up of the earth star fungus.
11 Shaggy caps (also known as lawyer's wigs).
12 Common ink cap.
13 Elf caps, a spring species.
14 The lilac coloured Amethyst deceiver.
15 Only 0.5-1cm across, the eyelash fungus. Another spring species.
Our lawn has circles of fairy ring fungi, spreading out from the mycelium of a long-gone central fungus. Our dead oak tree has been affected by honey fungus; its boot lace strands revealed as the dead bark peels back.
Foul smelling stinkhorns erupt each year attracting flies to their mucilaginous caps and which flies spread their spores (image 17). Earthballs have grown their wrinkled yellow-brown globose scaly structures which decay and spread their spores into the wind helped by falling rain drops pounding their surfaces (image 18). The strange white helvella (image 19) So many smaller fungi too, candle snuffs, brain fungi, cauliflower fungi (images 20, 21 and 22) and a wide range of fungi like slime moulds and lichens (lichenised fungi symbiotic with algae) both of which have stories of their own.
I could go on (and on) but more than enough for now. Although, I must mention the amazing aurora that Mary and I watched across the village green during the evening of the 10th October (image 23).
16 Brown-haired white cup, another small spring species.
17 Heleomyzid flies on stinkhorn.
18 Common earthballs.
19 White helvella (on the footpath alongside the A3 slip road about 5m outside the Stroud parish boundary).
20 Candle-snuff fungi.
21 Yellow brain fungi.
22 Cauliflower fungus.
