On Sunday 6th November I led a fungi walk in Aldershot in Hampshire, on behalf of Brimstones.
Interesting fact: Aldershot means a piece of land (‘shot’) home to alder trees. It’s the same for the placename of Oakshot, sometimes with an extra ‘t’ included. Helpfully, there were plenty of alder trees on this walk and more than enough rain to keep them happy.
I whipped round the woodland to gather some specimens for the walk intro. The conditions were rough – high winds and lashing rain. I actually failed to find much of note for the first half an hour looking. It was only until moving into a heathy area of birch and oak that things began to pop.
Candlesnuff fungus – ever reliable
That said, I wouldn’t describe the mushroom situation as of 6th November as ‘popping’. More like slopping. There had been heavy downpours that morning and across the previous week. This means mushrooms are quite washed out or else just mush!
That said, when the attendees for the walk joined up and we began looking with all those extra pairs of eyes (and some lovely late afternoon sunshine) we found so much more than I could see alone in the rain. It’s a reminder that the role of a walk leader is not to know everything (ha) but to enable others to tune in and learn something yourself in return.
Local samples including white saddle and false deathcap
I collected a bunch of species, some already uprooted, to show to the group at the start and give a sense of what we were looking for. This included a brittlegill, false deathcap, brown birch bolete, coral fungus, sulphur knight, sulphur tuft, and white saddle.
Upon walking through the site I was thinking about dog stinkhorn and, moments later, I saw that very species collapsed in some bramble. Visualise the mushrooms you want to see in the world is my advice. The problem is that this is a visually challenging species.
Dog stinkhorn is one of the weird ones
Other less common sightings (for my eyes anyway) were elfin saddles. These are similar to the white saddles also seen here but are often smaller and have a blue-grey cap, if you could call it that. I took a pic but can’t bear to share it as it’s out of focus and very dark.
What I didn’t take photos of were lots of brittle gills, some fly agaric, and the hundreds of small bonnets in the leaf litter. It had the feel of a season passing its peak.
On Sunday 30th October I was admiring Jupiter in Dartmoor’s pitch black skies when what looked like a satellite skimmed above the tower of the illuminated church (header photo only viewable in browser).
At first thought it was a satellite due to its steady glide, but then satellites don’t usually burn up in the atmosphere, which is what this object did.
It later turned out that the trail of light was part of the Orionid meteor shower. Above is a photo kindly donated to Wikimedia Commons to illustrate it.
This Orionid was seen outside the peak for this shower. It was even more lucky because the weather surrounding those nights had been pretty much torrential rain and the night sky had been tucked away behind cloud.
The Orionids aren’t anything to do with the constellation of Orion directly, but are so named because they appear nearby and their naming helps people (like me) to locate them. These meteors are actually fragments of Hally’s Comet, which you may have heard of.
Jupiter seen through the leaves of a silver birch tree (Dartmoor, November 2022)
This is a great time to observe the night sky and take in all the night has to offer. Redwings are arriving in their thousands and can be heard even over the most built-up and light-polluted parts of the UK. While the Orionid meteor flashed across the sky, redwings were covering the night sky in their own, invisible but audible way.
A few nights later the skies cleared after days of heavy rain and high winds. This gave a good chance to look at Orion, which was fixed perfectly from the back of where I was staying at the time of viewing:
The constellation of Orion: Dartmoor November 2022
Cropping a bit closer you can see the fierce glow of the Orion Nebula in the bottom right-hand part of the image:
Also prominent and not too far from Orion was the Pleiades:
The Pleiades: Dartmoor, November 2022
I’m using a new camera (Olympus EM-1 MIII) at the moment which has the ability to autofocus stars with a special feature. It didn’t actually work that well for me, though I was taking these photos handheld and may have had the settings wrong. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing, as much as my astrophotography attempts are to be honest!
I was really drawn to this large bright star to the left-hand side(!) of Orion. I need to be better at noting the locations of stars in relation to other constellations. Looking at Stellarium I think it’s either Mars or Betelgeuse.
I’ve had a burst of American visitors in recent days (to my blog, not my house). So thanks for visiting, y’all, and sorry about the year you’ve had. You may have noticed I’ve slipped to monthly posts on here. Between April and October I posted blogs every Monday without pause, which is a tricky task…
Here’s my seasonal update of stuff you don’t need to know about, but then welcome to the Internet. What I’m writing Soon I will be self-publishing my third poetry collection, Fool’s Wood. It’s seven years since my last one and this collection has taken longer because of LIFE. There will be a booklet and also…
In mid-October I met up with the Heathlands Reunited team at a Hampshire heathland in the Surrey borders. The meeting was to scope out a fungi walk I will be leading with them next month, and I thought it would be worth sharing some of the sightings. They will no doubt differ next month when autumn is well and truly progressing towards winter.
Very early on we found a perfect scarletina bolete (Neoboletus luridiformis)! This is one of my favourite species, having only seen one once before, on chalk on the South Downs Way in 2019.
Elsewhere in the bolete family, there were loads of brown birch boletes (Leccinum scabrum), most of which were in very good condition. Bramshott is a heathland so there’s a lot of birch there.
There were also plenty of Boletus edulis but they seemed to be mostly covered in mould after recent rain. This part of the Weald and Downs is quite misty and damp at times, so the mushrooms were probably quickly affected by the conditions.
There were lots of these red mushrooms that you may have heard of before. They’re enjoying a good year.
Less spotty amanitas included the highest numbers of tawny grisette mushrooms (Amanita fulva) I’ve ever encountered.
This grisette had fallen over. At the base you can see the ‘egg’ the fruiting body emerges from.
Along with those amanitas, the most common mushroom by a long, long way was the brown rollrim (Paxillus involutus). This is a poisonous mushroom which seems to be having a very good year.
Here’s a closer look at one of those grizzly bears. I first saw this mushroom when attending a walk from someone who taught me a lot – David Warwick – in Nunhead in SE London. He pulled what looked like a piece of rubbish from an old tree pit, what turned out to be the brown roll rim. I’ll never forget it!
As mentioned previously this season, the russulas are having a strong year. These lovely yellow ones, were appearing afresh from under the pines and birch. You can see a collapsed amanita in the background.
I have considered whether to try and spend more time learning to identify russulas. My focus is on learning families rather than getting obscure fungi down to species level. I am not completely a scientist in this and my aim is to produce photographs and write these blogs. It becomes all about how much time is available to you and what the best use of that time is.
As we finished scouting the route for the walk, we bumped into a group of women who were picking mushrooms. They had a woven basket full to the brim. From what I could make out they had picked a lot of honey fungus, ceps, a scarletina bolete and one of the leccinum boletes. We got talking to them and discovered they were Polish – I can speak a little bit, which I deployed here, always received very warmly! – and the woman in charge really knew her stuff. She said she was going to pickle them in olive oil and was happy with the slug-bitten state of that cep you can see on the lefthand-side.
I’ve written before about the place mushrooms have in historically ‘Slavic’ countries such as Poland. This is not something you would often see in England, nor to encounter someone with the level of confidence in their knowledge. Of course no nation of people can be generalised or defined in any one way but the English culture has become one of mycophobia.
If anything is to be said in riposte to that, it’s that the level of interest and intrigue in fungi in England is growing. We were here to plan a route for a public fungi walk, after all!
On a warm and clear day in October I walked between two of Sussex’s most famous and well-loved hillforts: Chanctonbury Ring and Cissbury Ring. This is a walk that you can access by public transport, with buses to Washington and then from Findon off the A24.
I didn’t know much about Iron Age hillforts until I worked in the South Downs National Park and had the chance to learn from people working at the National Trust and other heritage experts. Still, my knowledge is not strong on this subject.
It is amazing to think that these hilltops might once have held the equivalent of small villages, using the hilltops to monitor the movement of people across land in the north, and at sea in the south.
The walk winds its way up through woodland to Washington chalk pits, an old chalk quarry that’s now habitat for butterflies and orchids. Here you get good views north to the Greensand Hills where Leith Hill, the highest point in SE England can be spotted (out of shot on the right hand side in the north).
It wouldn’t be a walk for me without the sighting of something fungal. The cow pats in a field approaching Cissbury Ring contained some inkcaps which may be the uncommon snowy inkcap. In the distance the ridge of the Downs bowls away west towards Amberley and the Arun Valley.
Immediately upon ascending the Downs, you can get good views south to Cissbury Ring, a hillfort much, much bigger than Chanctonbury Ring. In the distance are views of the south coast and, in this image, the Rampion windfarm. It’s named after ‘the pride of Sussex’, round-headed rampion, a flower more common in the South Downs.
You approach Chanctonbury Ring on the South Downs Way. I like this subtle stretch of the trail, with the beech trees that cover the ring giving a parkland feel.
In the distance beyond Chanctonbury Ring are the aerial towers of Truleigh Hill, home to the Youth Hostel and secret bunkers (apparently).
I first heard of Chanctonbury Ring when reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. There are stories of the ring being ‘haunted’, not just by nature writers. It’s a welcome place to sit and rest, taking in the views under the fair shade of the beech trees. You can understand why this smaller hillfort would be such a good location to observe the comings and goings in the surrounding landscape.
Continuing east on the South Downs Way, views of Devil’s Dyke begin to open out. During the walk the site was visible through the glinting of the sun hitting car windows in the National Trust car park!
Devil’s Dyke (what is one of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring parts of the Downs) can be seen in the mid-left/centre of the image where the dark lump of woodland sits atop the ridge. Truleigh Hill is again visible with the masts.
Turning back to look over your shoulder gives a nice view of Chanctonbury Ring. I think the lump of hills in the right hand side of the image is Black Down, the highest point in the South Downs National Park, near Haslemere in Surrey.
Leaving the site of Chanctonbury Ring gives the impression of walking straight into the sea.
There’s a southern turning to take towards Cissbury Ring and off the South Downs Way. The track leads alongside arable fields and shooting cover. In this view the distant shape of the Isle of Wight is visible in the top right.
The resplendent South Downs set against a ribbon of blue sea and cloud-scattered sky.
Approaching views of Cissbury Ring.
Cissbury Ring is owned by the National Trust, thank god.
On Cissbury Ring there are better views of Brighton and the Seven Sisters cliffs reaching round to Eastbourne. This was a good way to observe the landing of invading armies but probably also to monitor trade.
Out at sea you can get closer views of the white turbines of the windfarm. The development required cables to be dug into the landscape, with a long strip having to be cut through the Downs to reach the electricity terminal. One person I know who lives in Hove said they were comforted by the red flashing lights on the horizon at night.
This sycamore tree got quite a lot of Instagram interest during lockdown, when a local person posted stunning phone pics of the sunsets up here. This is looking towards the Findon Valley.
Looking back where we’d travelled from, Chantoncbury Ring’s mini-hillfort can be seen as a beech clump on the hill, but much smaller now.
To the west, if you have binoculars, you can see the City of Portsmouth outlined on the horizon.
A last look across the Findon Valley, west into the Downs. The ramparts of the hillfort are in the image’s foreground.
Here’s another entry in my slow-blogging Oak Timbers series. You can view my galleries and posts archive here. I visited Salisbury in Wiltshire (south-west England) for the first time in 2023 and was really charmed by the place. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, Salisbury is the place for you. Here’s a gallery…
I’m getting into more of a routine of recording and editing audio, so here is the latest episode of Unlocking Landscapes. Listen on Podbean or via the usual platforms. Also via YouTube: https://youtu.be/y1K9Pqx68to?si=B-Fdhf3sdDH35Z8w Following on from July’s rather optimistic fungi walk, I popped back to the same area of ancient Wealden woodland to see if…
Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria, June 2025 This is a longer post of the images I captured during a recent visit to Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. We travelled to Innsbruck on a sleeper train from Amsterdam. It’s such a great experience and is significantly lower in carbon emissions compared with flying. If you consider the fact…
The title of this post sounds like a type of east London headwear. As you may have guessed, it’s actually about a mushroom in south London.
I led my first public fungi walk of the year with the Dulwich Society at Dulwich Park on 23rd October, despite the thunderstorms either side and torrential downpour intro.
My Dad taught me to play football in Dulwich Park and I was born in Dulwich Hospital. It has many happy memories for me. But no, I didn’t go to Dulwich College!
It’s a fantastic park that provides space and enjoyment to millions of people each year. It was also good for fungi on this occasion and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the things we found. As a landscape it’s former farmland bequeathed to the local council for public enjoyment. Before being farmed privately it was likely wood pasture common land. The Dulwich Society have a FANTASTIC localhistory Twitter account which has a lot of relevant info.
Charlie and the shrooms
The most interesting find of the walk was a large group of fungi on the decaying stump of a poplar tree along one of the carriageways. From a distance I spotted what looked like litter sat on top of the stump. My colleague Charlie want to have a closer look and I soon followed with the group after she gave a confirmatory thumbs up. It was fungi, not rubbish.
I was baffled by these shrooms. The stump’s bark was peeling away and some honey fungus boot laces were present underneath the remaining wood. But the mushrooms didn’t have the features of any honey fungus I had seen. We did see some earlier in the walk, for comparison.
Honey fungus ‘boot laces’ reaching out from behind the remaining bark
All I could say to the group was that it was likely the mushrooms, whatever species they were, was breaking down what what remained of the poplar tree.
I did some research when I got home that evening but it took me a while to establish what the species was. It didn’t help that this mushrom, what turned out to be poplar fieldcap, has a couple of scientific names and several common names: Poplar Fieldcap, Poplar Mushroom, Pioppino, Velvet Pioppini, Piopparello.
Perhaps the variety of common names is because this is seen as a nice edible mushroom. That’s what you find with something like Boletus edulis which is known as cep (France), porcini (Italy), and penny bun (England). I think it’s known as king bolete in North America. Those mushrooms which are either highly desireable or undiserable (deathcap) are usually subject to common names in different languages.
Thanks to everyone who came to the walk, it was a lot of fun! Great to see so many people despite the very wet weather. After all, that is what the mushrooms want!
I’m back from my annual visit to the west of Ireland. I managed a couple of day trips to forage for photos, which will crystallise later this year into dedicated posts, all being well. Like many people I enjoy the Blind Boy Podcast, none more so when I have the headspace to take in all…
This is the first of a series of posts I’ve been working on covering national relationships with mushrooms. It’s just a bit of fun, but there’s definitely some interesting stuff to share.
In August I made my annual visit to the Weald and Downland Living Museum in the South Downs. You can see my timber-framed building photo gallery here. This is the first view you encounter inside the museum grounds after you pay your entry fee. Amazing to think the medieval hall house is from Cray in…
Along with several experts on London’s landscapes, wildlife and habitats, I contributed my own chapter to London Wildlife Trust’s London in the Wild: Exploring Nature in the City. It is now available to buy.
My chapter, as you have probably guessed is about fungi, with a focus on south-east London’s woodlands.
I attended the launch of the book along with my family at Camley Street Natural Park in mid-October. It was great to hear Kabir Kaul read his chapter about a young person’s perspective on the future of nature in London and to be in a room with so many people who care so much about London’s wild spaces.
Mathew Frith outlines the book’s place in London’s nature publications, October 2022
I’m grateful to London Wildlife Trust for reaching out to me and asking if I would like to contribute back in January 2021. Particular thanks to Laura Mason, Mathew Frith and David Mooney.
The journey to appearing in print has been a long one for me. I wrote a piece for a book a decade ago, my first paid gig as a writer. Being paid for writing is something that I have never managed to maintain, so it was a big deal. I pre-ordered the book from my local bookshop and marched in there on publication day. I picked up my copy, opened it and leafed through every page in the book.
I couldn’t find my piece.
In its place I found a generic (sorry) article about the landscape I had been asked to write about, and an illustration that looked like it had been chucked in last minute (again, sorry). That was a devastating experience for my writing career, and probably killed my confidence for years and in many ways stopped me from ever wanting to pursue writing as a career. The editors never contacted me to say it wouldn’t be included or to give any explanation. Publishers, that’s not a good way to do things.
There is something poetic about being published in the first book of an organisation that I have such fond memories of, and that gave me opportunities and a sense of trust that can be hard to come by in your working life.
You can buy London in the Wild from the big players and the indie bookshops too. I’m not sure Waterstones are doing so well with their online ordering systems at the moment so I would check that out beforehand.
Not that kind of battle, but instead to the village in East Sussex. Battle the village is the site of one of the major battles of the Norman Conquest of England of 1066, when the Normans invaded Britain and defeated the Anglo-Saxons. It’s a period in history that absolutely fascinates me. The land ownership brought…
It’s been more than 20 years since I studied First World War fiction in sixth form college. It remains some of my favourite reading and has dominated my book consumption of late, so here’s a run-through of my adventures in this very challenging area of literature and history. My family and the First World War…
On a recent visit to a local woodland, I accidentally stumbled into teletubbyland. I don’t mean some bizarre, super-rich person’s eco village, simply that I had bumped into one of the characters from this incredibly weird but very popular childrens TV programme.
Violet webcap
Of course I’m not actually seriously saying that some giant purple baby thing with an antenna on its head was hanging out in the woods – wouldn’t surprise you though, really – but something in its image. I’m talking about a violet webcap (Cortinarius violacious).
Moving to less colourful characters, in the same area I found a large community of bolete mushrooms, a mix of bay bolete (Imlera badia) and ceps (Boletus edulis). I didn’t pick any if you were wondering, but I did take some pictures!
This is a rather tellytubby-esque bolete, with its friends in the background. There were huge numbers of fungi here, a lovely thing to see. I posted about these recently.
Fly agaric
Of course it would be wrong to leave the wild emojis out of this post, which appear to be having a very good year indeed.
I was doing the rather annoying thing of using two cameras for this walk, which meant having hands full but trying to crouch down and not tumble downhill at the same time. I used my wider angle zoom lens for this lovely little russula. The sunlight touched its cap at the perfcet moment to create some very nice highlighting. More and more I think I prefer images where the mushroom can be seen within its habitat.
Here’s some more interesting perspective. I couldn’t work out what this bracket fungus was from afar. It was growing in the barkless section of a beech tree that had part collapsed.
This illustrates it a bit better. I’ve not done any work to try and identify it just yet so am not sure of the species. As ever, if you do know please pop me a comment below.
I struggled to get a picture I was entirely happy with here. This is a false deathcap (Amanita citrina), a common species in oak and beech woodlands. This one was in perfect condition. The light from the sun in the background was quite harsh. I used my phone torch to highlight the gills and stipe.
Here’s the mushroom again from above. You can see the veil remnants on the cap, which have become attached after it broke through from the ‘egg’ seen at the base of the stipe. Looking at the iNaturalist page it says this species is about to be broken up, taxonomically, into several species!
There were many fine Russula mushrooms to be found, and many not so fine. They were perhaps at every couple of footsteps in this part of the woodland. I’m not sure of the species exactly but I like the droplets and the colour of the cap. Russulas also have lovely clean stipes when they first arrive. Doesn’t last though!
I took some mushrooms that had been naturally uprooted home to identify them. I was quite interested in this little group and picked one to take back for ID. Looking through my books and using iNaturalist, I think they are a species of chanterelle. Probably Craterellus cinereus or Craterelluscornucopioides.
Moving even further away from the more typical gilled fungi, I found a nice little grouping of coral fungi. The above look to me like little white fires in the moss. I’m not sure of the species.
These are about as far away from teletubbyland as you’re going to get in this blogpost, so a good place to end.
I noticed some good news about ash trees recently and wanted to share my experience of a difficult decade for the European ash (Fraxinus excelsior, referred to here as ‘ash’), as well as some of the photos I’ve taken of this iconic tree.
From over a decade of speaking to (often random) people about nature, wildlife, landscape, etc., I’ve noticed that one of the things that really surprises or troubles people is when things grow on/in other things.
On this list I would include trees, insects and fungi.
It’s messy out there – a West Sussex heathland, October 2022
The understanding that insects grew inside other insects was enough for Charles Darwin to doubt his own faith. The idea that cuckoo hatchlings are hard-wired to chuck out the eggs of the dunnocks, wrens, pipits or warblers it shares a nest with, is also deeply disturbing to people.
Imagine how you’re going to feel about mushrooms that grow from other mushrooms. Prepare yourself.
At least twice now I’ve found a white fungus growing from black mushrooms in the woodlands of the Sussex Weald. The first time was a few years ago on a National Trust property, on what turned out to be powdery piggyback fungus (Asterophora lycoperdoides) growing on the caps of blackening brittlegill (Russula nigricans).
The image above was taken on what may well be that species, but I’ve not done any work on identifying either of them. From the images I would guess it was more likely to be silky piggyback (Asterophora parasitica) which has a nice write-up here.
“The classic Asterophora picture is probably plate 5 in part 8 of Oscar Brefeld’s Untersuchungen aus dem Gesammtgebiete der Mykologie, published in 1889″ (via Australian National Herbarium)
Piggyback fungi are parasitic due to the fact that they ‘invade’ the tissue of mushroom fruiting bodies. It should be obvious, due to the prevalence of fungi in our world, that fungi grows on just about everything. But it’s rarely illustrated in such an elfin manner. Mould on a mushroom doesn’t have the same allure as ‘little mushroom guys’.
Elsewhere on this walk I spotted two common species gracing us with their presence for the first time this season. One of those was another parasitic species, but this one is much more well known and seemingly reviled in some quarters.
This is one of the honey fungi (Armillaria) which only this weekend (15th October ’22) was described as ‘the most destructive fungal disease in the UK’ by the Royal Horticultural Society. That, to my understanding, is not true. The only way to deal with that is in another blog post so we can crown the actual most destructive fungal disease in the UK. If you can’t wait for that, one of the most viewed blogs on this website is this one about honey fungus which I wrote previously.
Don’t worry though, this website is not a greatest hits archives just yet!
The Most Destructive Fungal Disease in the UK is quite beautiful when it appears in its natural habitat of ancient oak woodland.
Another fungus that decided to show its face is the common puffball (Lycoperdonperlatum). This is an edible species that I usually find alongside footpaths but is also often presented deeper into woodlands (sounds like a Yo La Tengo song). It always reminds me of the submarine rolls my parents would buy me from M&S as a kid during Saturday trips to the shopping centre.
Russulas have already made an appearance in this post with the shrooms they’re giving a piggyback to. I would say it’s been a strong year for this group of difficult to identify fungi, but they are often out in good numbers. This is a family that can be found with a clean, white stipe and white, brittle gills.
To finish, I went to check in on the stairway to mushroom heaven that I posted about last week. It was quite amazing to see that these edible stepping stones remained. Evidently the foragers in this particular woodland are few and far between, be they human or squirrel.
There are a couple of intriguing species I encountered in my garden between mid-late May, one of the very best times to look for our tiny invertebrate friends in this part of the world.
This is your annual fly agaric appreciation post featuring some special guests.
It was so good in the woods on the 2nd October that I went out again the following day, what turned out to be the 3rd October. I encountered my first fly agarics of the season. I’ve written about the cultural ‘theories’ around this fungus before which you might be interested to read. Apparently they aren’t the reason that Father Christmas dresses in red and white or that reindeer fly, but I just want it to be true.
I’d seen lots of excited posts on Twitter showing fly agaric popping up across the UK. It was pretty clear that it would also be the same story locally to me. Fly agarics seem to fruit in waves, with September being a surprisingly good month for them.
One path I often follow may as well be signposted as mushroom alley, as each autumn it is studded with species like fly agaric and other Amanitas. Though something has eaten bits of this specimen, it’s important to remember it’s a pretty toxic mushroom that comes from a bad family. Fly agaric’s sinister uncles and aunts include destroying angel and deathcap. Panthercap is the cousin who you don’t hear about for a while but who is definitely not good news. Joking aside, these mushrooms are benign to look at, it’s just when you try and eat them that there might be a problem.
That said, they are by far one of the most beautiful mushrooms around. You have to wonder what someone who doesn’t know this thing exists must think when they see them pop up. They’re found in lots of different habitats (and may actually be invasive outside their native range) so that surprise encounter will surely touch someone.
“OMG, they have wild emojis here!”
Nearby were yet more untrustwothy Amanitas, such as this grey-spotted amanita or panther cap. You decide. It’s definitely not a blusher because its stipe isn’t rosy…
Here’s some good parenting, taking the kids out for an evening walk. Whether these are blusher or grey-spotted amanita is the accomplished mycologist’s guess.
Not too far away from that was a grisette, kindly showing off its wings from which it appears but is unable to adapt to flight. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time. That said, fungi do fly due to their spores being pretty much everywhere.
Soothing tree image to allow a moment of calm…
Another narcissist of the fungal kingdom was on fine fruiting form. Porcelain fungus is one-that-almost-always-grows-on-beech-trees. It seems like a lot of the big old beech trees near to me keep collapsing which allows to you to get nice clearance underneath a family of this photogenic fungus. What I mean here is that the limbs are raised off the ground. The situation with the beech trees actually isn’t good, because they’re significant ancient/veteran trees and would take hundreds of years to replace. I just don’t have that sort of time at the moment.
Have I written about this beautifully mucusy fungus before? Well I should have done. It’s actually edible from what I’ve read though you’d need to remove the viscidy stuff on the cap. They’re related to velvet shank, an absolute babe of the mushroom world, hence their photogenicity. I’ve never used that word before.
I’ve been seeing a lot of birch boletes this autumn, but they’re never in good condition. This orange birch bolete was growing under some lush grass growth. As all boletes do, it has pores not gills. At this point you realise how much impact you can have with-three-words.
This is how most of these boletes appear to me, nothing like the baskets that people show off on Instagram from countries like R****a or Poland.
Here we have brown birch bolete, one that always has a disappointment in store when you look under the bonnet. It doesn’t scream “nom, nom, nom” to me. I don’t think that out of focus slug minds too much, though.
In almost the same spot last year I found some nice tangerine-coloured mushrooms like this. I think they’re probably gymno-something or other, but I don’t encounter them often enough to peg their ID down properly.
This is a good place to end, where the world will probably end: surrounded by sulphur tuft. This species is having a good year, and it knows it.
I was visiting a local and very popular woodland on 2nd October when I discovered an incredible scene, like something out of a folk tale. To the side of the path were four bay bolete mushrooms (Imleria badia) growing on the mossy mound created by a fallen tree. They were aligned in some hilariously synchronised arc from the bottom left to the top right.
Bay bolete
I couldn’t believe that no one else had noticed this display, seeing as it was so close to the footpath and there were lots of families in the area. I suppose it makes a difference that I was actively looking for this sort of thing. This species is bay bolete, an edible mushroom in that most famous of families, which I have found before in Sussex but never in such a photogenic state. I didn’t pick the mushrooms.
Another important way to identify boletes and their relatives (or allies, as they are oddly known), is to look for pores rather than gills under the cap, as can be seen above.
They really were a joy to find! These kinds of encounters are what make this time of year so special.
Sheathed woodtuft, lit with my phone camera torch
There were more great mushrooms sightings to be found during this walk, what will probably go down as one of the best days of the season for me. This is a gathering of sheathed woodtuft (Kuehneromyces mutabilis) on a fallen tree. This is known to be edible but can be confused with the drop-dead poisonous funeral bell (Galerina marginata).
The lighting and recent wash of rain made the mushrooms lovely to look at. Once again you can see where the idea for lampshades probably came from.
Behind the scenes of my mushroom photo– I use a ‘gorilla pod’ mini tripod and a mirrorless camera, usually with a slow shutterspeed, low ISO and ‘small’ aperture (around f8-11)
I got into an interesting conversation with a man who approached me when he saw I was taking photos of this patch. He said he had been taking photos of mushrooms for years with his phone, and that this would be a very good year because ‘the rollrims were out’.
Potential rollrim (Paxillus) mushrooms
I think the mushrooms above are rollrims, a group that are renowned for their inedibility and toxicity. The man I spoke to was convinced that their abundance was a pointer to a strong showing to come from the mushrooms. That’s new information for me, and something I will consider as the season progresses.
I judge the potential of a mushroom season by the amount of rain. For example, the woods now (10th October) look as dry as summer only days after heavy downpours. I would put this down to drought in the local area and the lack of deeper levels of water that trees can draw up and provide to the fungi around them or the wider ecosystem. Trees are known to trade water with mushrooms in return for certain minerals and things they can’t capture alone. The rain had swelled some of the gills (streams, as they’re known in Sussex) that had remained dry throughout the summer.
I found one rather boggy area to be covered in thousands of an orange species which I’m not able to identify.
Here’s a closer view for anyone who may have an idea – please let me know in the comments!
Blushers (Amanita rubescens) were out in force, with some really beautiful specimens to be found. This very nicely set mushroom caught the late afternoon light from its position in moss. I would consider this a portfolio mushroom image!
Another nice species to find is porcelain fungus (Oudemansiella mucida) which almost always occurs on dead beech wood (Fagus sylvatica). Nice images of these mushrooms can be achieved when you focus your lens on the underside of the cap to see the dramatic gills.
These days when mushrooms dominate the woodland floor are a reminder that you need to keep pushing yourself to learn more, and not just about the colourful and common species. The better quality leaf litter was, well, littered with grey and brown-capped fungi that I am unable to identify. The photo above gives a good example. I’m not sure if these are Russula or something else.
Under the hollies there were lots of Amanitas appearing, with this potentially being a grey-spotted amanita (Amanita excelsa var. spissa).
Sulphur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare) was as common as it usually is, probably making up about 15% of all sightings. It’s a very nice species to photograph due to its colour and the shapes of the mushrooms when young.
These bonnets (Mycena) were a nice find, very hard to miss alongside a main path on a mossy branch. The one on the left really does look like an alien spacecraft.
To finish, one of my favourite things to see at this time of year is the twig parachute (Collybiopsis ramealis). You can potentially take some incredible images with this species, as it sprouts along twigs and other bits of wood.
I didn’t do that on this occasion(!), but the most important thing is to get out there and experience this fleeting time of year. The mushrooms are calling.
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