Fungus Foray

Woodland walking, pleasant at any time of the year, can offer a bonus to the discerning Autumn rambler. A time of fiery red and brilliant yellow leaves, it is also the season when some of the more interesting of the three thousand or so species of larger British fungi are most likely to be seen.

Hidden amidst the leaf litter, or enjoying the dappled sunshine of a leafy glade, they are easily overlooked, however, unless a par­ticularly damp Summer has lingered on into a mild September and October. Then by a dramatic increase in size and abundance they make their presence known.

I can recall one such season in birch woods near Ashbridge in Hertfordshire, when I came upon a circle of Fly Agaric (Amanita virosa), each at least two feet tall, with red-spotted caps as many feet across. So striking to look at in fact, that I half expected a band of pixies to emerge from a grassy knoll behind me and take their seats.

They would have been wise not to nibble the upholstery had they done so though. The garish coloured species owes its common name to its thirteenth century role as a fly killer.

More common are the Russulas, which come in pur­ple, green, scarlet, yellow, cream and violet shades, some of which are edible, some of which, quite definitely are not. The apricot scented Chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius), a delicious funnel shaped fungi found in mixed woodlands is yellow to orange apricot. The Wood Blewit (Lepista nuda), also extremely edible, is lilac to reddish violet in colour.

Puffballs, so named because they are cylindrical, and filled with millions of spores, which puff out like clouds of smoke if you touch them when they are ripe, come in various sizes. The largest reported specimen of the Giant puff­ball (Lycoperdon giganteum) was reputedly mistaken for a sheep when seen in New York State in 1877. A more normal size is about the circumference of a man's head though, again after a wet summer, I have seen them much bigger.

The slightly flattened while to yellowish spore mass has been claimed as a forerunner of the football, though its comparative fragility would seem to make that unlikely. Ripe spores were used by early physicians to cauterize wounds, however, and by country people for tinder both for kindling and to make smoke for handling bees. A young fungus is said to be delicious when divided into steaks and fried.

The Shaggy cap (Coprinus comatus) on the other hand, is better stewed or baked but only in its juvenile state. With age the tall, white, lawyers wig cap turns to an indigestible black, oily, consistency. Books usually give their habitat as grassland where soil has recently been disturbed, but whenever I have come upon it, the shaggy cap has been in clusters under trees on the fringes of light woodland.

     When eating this fungi it is a wise precaution to keep the wine bottle tightly corked as it con­tains a substance which reacts with alcohol in the body to cause nausea.

    No such problems with (Boletus edulis), which has a rich, toasted brown cap reminis­cent of a penny bun – its common name. Found predominately in the heavier shade of beech woods, it can be eaten fresh or used dried as seasoning.

A friend of mine who was incurably addicted to Boletes once got me to take her to woodlands near Maidstone where another friend had told her that they grew. I wasn't surprised when we came away empty handed though. Knowledge of such sites is generally too jealously guarded to be so easily passed on. Their whereabouts is the sort of secret an enthusiast is prepared to take with them to the grave.

Just as the Roman Emperor Claudius did with a few secrets of his own, though in his case not inten­tionally, and not ones concerning the where­abouts of certain larger fungi.  The fungus he was poisoned by is one which is extremely poisonous, but also fortunately, extremely rare in Britain, the Destroying Angel (Amanita virosa), which closely resembles young specimens of the Field Mushroom (Agraricus campestris) and has sometimes been eaten in mistake for them, with fatal results. I have only seen it once, several years ago, growing under birches in mixed woodland. Not the type of habitat from which I would expect to gather Field Mushrooms, yet it was only the white gills on the underside of the cap (mushrooms have grey, pink, or dark brown gills) and the volva at the base of the stem, which finally con­vinced me that here was a much more deadly species.

 Claudius was poisoned by it, not by accident, but by his wife, the Empress Agrippina, who prepared him a meal containing the fungus, when she felt that it was time for her son, Nero, to take over the throne. I have used the fungus and its properties in the plot of my latest murder mystery, available from Amazon Kindle as an e-book, The Body in the Woods.

Not that a fungus has to closely resemble a Mushroom for it to be eaten in mistake for one. Death Caps (Amanita phalloides), such as those I saw grow­ing under beeches near Cranleigh in Surrey, have greenish olive caps with white rings and gills, and a sickly sweet smell, yet are rep­resentative of a species accounting for ninety per cent of all fungus-induced deaths. Deaths which, in Britain at least, result from mistaken identity rather than experimentation.

A pity then that all fungi aren't as immedi­ately recognizable as Fly Agaric? Or a pity that more people don't take the time and trouble to learn to distinguish the different species for themselves?

Varying characteristics, habitats and seasons are, after all, as marked between fungi as they are between trees, grasses or orchids. It is only through observation that the separate identities of any of them begin to emerge.

 

                                                  

 

           

                                                            Destroying Angel fungus