DISCOVER Fungi
Tasty, deadly, beautiful, grotesque, microscopic, enormous, the stuff of legend; these curious organisms don’t just brighten up a forest floor – they’re the reason the forest exists in the first place.
MY EYES ARE drawn to smoked haddock. It’s undoubtedly not smoked haddock, but the yellow, wavy heads of these Chanterelles rising from the leaf litter certainly look like it. Just a few steps later, I narrowly avoid stepping on a delicate, tiny beetroot-red umbrella. Then, treading more carefully, I spot another cap poking out of the moss, whose skirt looks like it’s being blown up in the wind.
Finally, after 20 minutes of repeatedly stopping, kneeling down, carefully observing (often with one cheek on the floor), then ID-ing, Imake it back to the path... I’d only wandered 10 yards off-track for acall of nature.
Tom, our photographer, is lying on his front, getting close-up shots of a Milkcap, which looks rather like how a blood cell is depicted in a school science book. “We’re not going anywhere soon,” I tell him. “I’ve just spotted three more species while going for a pee.” This doesn’t surprise him – we’ve been out here for more than an hour already and we can’t be more than 30 yards away from where we parked the car.
As Tom focuses on his Milkcap, I survey the thick carpet of verdant moss draped over the rocks and tree stumps that cover the forest floor. Just then, I spot something else. “Oh my goodness Tom, you’re not going to believe this!”
There, behind a rock, is the picture of a fairytale mushroom. It’s not fresh or symmetrical; there’s no sheen. This one’s rustic, with a broad, discoloured trunk and a bulbous orange cap that sags at the edges. It’s the mushroom equivalent of an ancient oak, looking as if it has been battered by decades of storms and ice. It isn’t hard to imagine miniature goblins sheltering beneath its cap, or a rude caterpillar sitting on top, smoking on a hookah.
The mushroom is an orange Bolete – large and conspicuous. And yet, we’d walked right past it without even noticing it. It barely seems possible. But then, that’s the thing about searching for fungi – you don’t see anything at first, then you start to get your eye in. Like stargazing, your eyes seem to become accustomed to the light, and things that were once invisible now stick out like a… well, like a large orange mushroom from a rug of green moss.
