Author: Daniel Greenwood

Landscape photographer with a focus on woods and trees, fungi, and macro photography

#FungiFriday: snuffling for shrooms in midwinter

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments

Midhurst - 3-1-2019 blog-6

Fungi Friday: 10th January 2020

I’ve barely made it out this year, as young as it’s been. That poses a big threat to the Fungi Friday machine but thankfully I know where to look. The focus at this time of year is on small and hardy species in the Kingdom of Fungi, species like candlesnuff fungus (Xylaria hypoxylon):

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I found this macabre specimen at the foot of a handrail post. They look so much like hands reaching out from the soil. No wonder other Xylaria have the names of dead man’s fingers and dead moll’s fingers. This species is called candlesnuff because you can flick the tips, in drier weather, and the white spores are released. It looks like a puff of smoke from a snuffed out candle.

In the fungal world candlesnuff is an Ascomycete or spore-shooter. Most mushroom-style fungi are Basidiomycetes, a group which spread their spores by ‘dropping’, usually on the wind. Mushrooms with gills are the perfect example of this. Wind-dispersal of spores is one of the oldest forms of reproduction on Earth.

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Other classic spore-shooters are beech jellydisc (Neobulgaria pura) above, which is common on fallen beech trees in November.

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The lack of January fungi can be helpful in reminding us of those which are more slow to colonise, things like lichen. This foliose lichen was growing on a fencepost (do not underestimate the wonder of fenceposts). Lichen is a symbiotic relationship between fungi, algae and cyanobacteria. The fungus produces the physical structure which provides a home to the cyanobacteria and algae which are capable of photosynthesis. It’s another reminder that fungi exists in the world in partnership with other organisms, something which we are so ignorant of as a species at times. For anyone who has tried to read Hegel, the German philosopher, I once read that a lichen is an example of the master-slave complex. The fungus is the master and the alga is the slave. The thing is, without the slave the master can’t prosper or maintain its status, so the master is in fact enslaved to its own prisoner. What’s that, myco-philosophy?

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In winter I look for signs of spring. In the 10 years that I’ve spent looking closely, the often mild winters have provided glimpses of the coming season far earlier than we expect. Here bluebells were breaking through the fractured leaf litter of oak and chestnut. It’s been a mild winter again at the end of the warmest decade on record.

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Winter sun, that precious resource.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you found anything interesting this week. Here are some articles I spotted recently:

100 million years in amber: Researchers discover oldest fossilized slime mold

‘Decomposition’ Series Knitted By Fiber Artist Leigh Martin aka Bromeleighad

My fungal archive

#FungiFriday: a mushy Christmas in south London

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OTH 25-12-2019 blog-4

Happy Fungi Friday everyone!

I’m a Londoner and I learned most of what I know about fungi and nature in London. Take that in physical and psychological terms, having spent most of my life there. One Tree Hill is a Local Nature Reserve in south-east London that has offered many happy wild hours (ecologically). I visit One Tree Hill as often as I can and did so to find some Christmas shrooms this year.

One Tree Hill has a weird history of being a remnant ancient woodland that had been cleared of trees and then has re-wooded itself in the past 60 years. It has old oak trees and new oak woodland spread across areas of old acid grasslands, which are rare but not in good condition anymore. It provides one of the best views of London you can find. You can read more about it here.

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December is never a good month for the most exciting fungi species because it’s cold and they struggle to fruit without milder weather. But I found a few species that I look for at this time of year.

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This photo was actually taken over Christmas 2018 at One Tree Hill but it’s one of the more photogenic things you can find at this time of year. They grow out of the fissures in bark, most of the time on oak. I’m not sure of the species.

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I think this is the same species but growing from a horizontal position in the late summer.

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In the more open, grassy areas atop One Tree Hill I found something I’ve not seen before. This is a deceiver (Laccaria laccata) with gills growing out of the top of the cap. I don’t know what the name for this ‘deformity’ is and an internet search definitely didn’t help.

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Deceivers get their name because they come in many different shapes and sizes, looking like different species each time. This year I saw huge numbers of them in the Sussex Weald. Here’s one in better condition:

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This is from Scotland in September, which you can read about here.

Wishing you many happy wild adventures in 2020. Thanks for reading and of course please share any interesting sightings or ID requests in the comments below!

Daniel

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#FungiFriday: witches’ butter? Of gorse, it is.

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Due to Christmas hols I’m a couple of days late to Fungi Friday on my blog, morphing instead to Mushroom Monday!

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time at Lullington Heath in the South Downs National Park. Lullington Heath is a National Nature Reserve with the super rare habitat chalk heath. It had lots of little waxcaps fruiting at the time.

As you can see Lullington Heath is dominated by gorse which affects the diversity of plants and fungi that can prosper there.

The gorse forms a scrubby woodland and provides ample habitat for one of the most striking species of fungus: yellow brain. It’s also known as witches’ butter, a lovely colloquial name that hints at the role fungi has in British folklore.

This is the yellow brain from the pics above. I cut it out before it was cleared and brought it into the sun. I hid it further away in the gorse afterwards.

It’s actually parasitic on crust fungi which you can see on the right hand side here.

Keep an eye out for my fungal year 2019, an account of things I found and photographed this year, which I’ll be hoping to post in January.

Merry Christmas to all the funguys and gals out there!

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The Sussex Weald: the realm of the ancient

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

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St. Leonard’s Forest, West Sussex, December 2019

The path slopes up between ranks of birch, beech and oak. On the banks bracken is encrusted with frost and the addition of oak and beech leaves. I love the sight of a silver-lined oak leaf and December is the month to find them.

It’s about 9am. Mist lingers up ahead like the faint hang of smoke from a campfire. All around I can hear the falling of droplets of water. Looking at my sleeves there is no sign of rain. Then I realise it’s the frost melting in the tops of the trees. Water only falls from their crowns.

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In among the trees small birds flock and feed. These mixed groups of species have been building since September. A trio of bullfinch slip away from me in birch branches and bracken. Their fluty calls are faint and sweet. A white bib on their backs marks them out as they escape deeper into the dripping woods.

St. Leonard’s Forest was once more open than this. You can find huge beech trees dotted around from when they had the freedom to grow uninhibited. Now many more trees compete with them for light in the sky, good and water in the ground. One of the beeches has been damaged in a storm. A third of its trunk has fallen, splitting in two directions. Its summer leaves are still held by the fallen branches, shielding the scene of its collapse.

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This is not a catastrophe. It could result in the tree living centuries longer. Looking more closely the trunk glows green with moss and algae. It raises one limb still high into the air. This is its lifeline. Its heartwood is now exposed and soon more insects and fungi will move in. This is not a symptom of human error or mistreatment. Its is the true wildness of a tree stepping into the realm of the ancient.

The Sussex Weald

#FungiFriday: little white brittlegills

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Happy Fungi Friday!

When temperatures touch freezing, it spells the end for the mushroom season. This is because fungal fruiting bodies are largely made of water and most species simply can’t excel if they’re frozen stiff. But temperatures in Sussex have been mild at times this week.

A good 6 mile walk in the High Weald produced almost no soil-based fungi. That is except for these tiny Russulas, otherwise known as brittlegills. This family of mushrooms is very big and beyond identifying them to that level, I find that doing the same to species level (especially with a photograph) is not really possible. These specimens had already been uprooted and had a pinkish cap to go with their Kendal mint cake white stipe. I would guess it is birch brittlegill (Russula betularum) due to the colouring and the fact it was under birch trees.

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You can see from the comparison with my thumb just how small but perfectly formed this mushroom was. They are a family of mushrooms to see in late summer when autumn’s cogs are beginning to turn and all the way through to the season’s close.

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On a mossy log I found this staunch shroom growing. The faint white remnants of a veil on the edges of the cap made me wonder if it was a webcap (Cortinarius). The webcaps are a huge family of mushrooms.

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You know you’re getting desperate when you’re photographing mushrooms in the condition above. This is an oyster mushroom growing from a dead birch tree alongside a stream.

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The Sussex Weald: a wader in the rushes

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Midhurst, West Sussex, December 2019

The cloud bares blue sky wounds above the Cowdray Ruins, as mist rises from the Rother. The sun breaks from the cover and melts the frosty rushes, droplets glimmer in brambles. Bull rushes thaw like over-frozen choc ices emerging from the bottom of the freezer.

A song thrush sings from the woods nearby and it has little competition. Except for a couple shouting at their dog as it flashes through the low rushes. Imagine if a song thursh was actually just saying ‘kids, go to school’, ‘where’s my breakfast’, ‘what’s the time-what’s the time-what’s the time’. Its beauty would shrivel away and it would become an annoyance. The mystery gives it life.

The dog runs free through the rushes, its paws sloshing as it seeks the scent at the end of its nose. Its owners’ cries grow louder, angry, fear creeping in. With it a small bird, a wader, bursts from the rushes and arrows out towards the town. It has a white breast and a long, thin bill, curving as it reaches the tip. Its wings are sharp like a modern fighter jet. I’m sure it’s a snipe.

The bird will have been roosting over night in the rushes and now will seek more wet grasslands, probably where the Rother snakes behind Midhurst and where there are less people. Not that there are really so many here. On spring evenings they perform an otherworldly song flight, something that I first heard over reedbeds in Poland a few years ago.

They sing in a bizarre, electronic kind of way, but also like someone skilled at blowing through a large blade of grass. That evening I watched it soar and swoop over the reeds and river. Birds hold such potential for us, the promise of their weird songs, in these dark winter months, offers hope.

The Sussex Weald

#FungiFriday: December jelly ear

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Midhurst - 10-12-2019 blog-2-2

Happy #FungiFriday!

You may have seen my attempts to photograph a mushroom every week on Twitter. I have hundreds of fungi images that I want to share so I’m now going to start posting a species each week (or one I’ve seen in that week). I’m not a forager and have never cooked or picked wild mushrooms to eat. I prefer taking pics and leaving shrooms for others to see.

To kick things off, this week I photographed jelly ear. This is a common species that, like in the image above, can be found growing on elder trees. It stays on a branch all year round and goes through a process of de- and rehydration. It seems happy in the winter months.

Jelly ear once had a more derogatory or racist name. This is largely because of the Latin name (Auricularia auricula-judae) which relates to Judas Escariot and the species’s association with elder. Judas is said to have died from hanging in an elder tree but that is almost certainly impossible because it is a very soft wood. The ears are said to be a remnant of his spirit. I call it jelly ear, as do all up to date field guides.

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The Sussex Weald: the final trumpets of autumn

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SLF - 30-11-2019 blog-11

St. Leonard’s Forest, West Sussex, November 2019

The last day of autumn. The final patches of beech, oak, hazel and birch leaves are all that resist the darkest greens and browns of a winter wood. The green leaflets of an elder dangle out across the path, the only ones left on the entire tree.

Grey squirrels round the trees in small groups, like people wrapping a maypole in its ribbons. They are elf-like in a place where little else moves. I stop to take a photo of a biscuit-brown pine tree and a woman waits alongside me.

‘I thought you’d seen an animal,’ she says when I look, her dog carrying on ahead of her.

‘Just squirrels,’ I say.

She laughs: ‘Oh, yes. Plenty of those!’

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The gill is full as it slaloms down through the woods. In a pond at the edge of the path fallen oak leaves rest in perfect stillness.

At the foot of the heath, golden mushrooms grow in the soil amidst the remains of bracken. They are so easy to miss. They’re trumpet chanterelles, a species as edible as the original. Like all the mushrooms I photograph, I’m not here to pick or eat them. Their trumpets curve out like gramophones, their stipes sinuous, yellow and tapering like a birch trunk.

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These are autumn’s final moments. The frosts are creeping in, our breaths stolen away on the air as they leave our lips.

The Sussex Weald

The Tamar Valley: London’s sylvan links with Buckland Abbey

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Buckland Abbey, Tamar Valley, Devon, November 2019

At last the rain has stopped. Buckland Abbey, once home to Sir Frances Drake (1540-1596), climbs out of its nook in the hillside, reflecting the stony skies above. Drake is known for ‘his’ ships which battled the Spanish Armada in the 1500s, for circumnavigating the earth and for his role in the slaughter of civilians on Rathlin Island in 1575.

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I first heard about him from spending time in south-east London’s remnant ancient woodland known as Great North Wood. It is said that some oaks grown in the Great North Wood were taken to the docks at Deptford and used in the building of some of Drake’s ships. It has never been verified. One thing that was verified at Deptford was Drake’s knighthood in 1851, on the ship named the Golden Hind, something I only learned at Buckland Abbey.

The fields around the Abbey are pocked by small cream sheep that run like chickens as we pass them on the track. In the distance the dammed River Tavy reflects the sky again, the dark woods flowing across the slopes to where the river enters the Tamar. Looking at the Ordnance Survey map, something stands out. To the north-west is a large woodland named The Great North Wood.

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Ordnance Survey © Crown Copyright 2019 and/or database right 2016. Licence number 100043379

Could this be simply because it’s so large, or because of Drake’s links to that area of south London? The name is said only to have been popularised in the Victorian period and could have been given to differentiate the once vast area of woodland to that of the Weald that covered most of south-east England in the Anglo-Saxon period. Perhaps this local wood was also named by residents of the Abbey in the 1800s.

Redwings are established now, flocking in the fields. I hear my first fieldfare chuck-chuck-chucking over the Abbey. Down in the woods beech trees burn even without the aid of sunlight. They brighten the most glowering corners. Hazels are yellowing and even the odd wych elm with its almost bulb-bright leaves. It’s here saying, ‘don’t forget about me.’ Many elms have gone, but wych elm survives.

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The rain threatens specks again as the light, if you can call it that, dwindles further. In a combe of a field a grey heron flaps its wings, either a slice of Buckland Abbey’s grey exterior breaking free, or a slither of sky lending itself south, to the glassy Tavy for the night.

The Sussex Weald: birches fizz

Daniel Greenwood4 Comments

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St. Leonard’s Forest, West Sussex, November 2019

After so much recent rain, the water flows fast through the s-shaped streambed of Sheepwash Gill. Clouds have consumed a sunny morning, Wealden clay clogs under foot. I’m trying to cross the gill by treading across the buffed sandstone which is usually above water. This is no ‘Robert Macfarlane climbing a mountain up a stream in his pants’ kind of effort. The water runs ankle-high against my boots.  On the other side a dog bounds down off the leaf-littered slope and barks at me, stopping my crossing. It’s big. It jumps around at the water’s edge in that ‘I’m trying to pretend I’m going to eat you’ kind of way. Its owner calls it back and I find another way to cross.

A girl watches me as I find a short gap to hop over. The dog is her family’s. They’re gathered around dens made from branches and logs on the banks of the gill. The eldest man is grappling with a thirty-foot long birch tree that’s hung up in another tree. He’s getting advice from his young son on how to get it down. The man is wearing brown leather safety boots, a sure sign of a construction worker enjoying a Sunday with his family in the woods.

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The birch won’t move much and he gives up. St. Leonard’s Forest is covered in birch. It’s the most westerly point of the High Weald’s heaths, much of which is covered by wild birch and gorse, or otherwise planted up with conifers for forestry. Birch is seen as an enemy or nuisance but it is a special tree that has benefited our species in our evolution. Its wood makes excellent spoons, its bark can be used as fire lighter, its sap tapped for syrup, its branches make brooms. Its Latin name ‘betula’ means ‘to beat’. Getting walloped by birch branches was once a recognised punishment, sometimes in public.

The birches are all yellowing and dropping now, turning to their deep, purple and leafless phase. The small yellow leaves catch by the petioles in mosses and on the splintered fibres of broken heartwood. In the dark pine plantations of St. Leonard’s Forest they fizz and spark.

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Explore the Sussex Weald