Mushrooms in late autumn

It has been a while since I posted some proper fungi spotting photos. Edible mushroom season is long gone, but quite a few tenacious fungi are still getting their heads above ground. Like this one, for instance:

Common cavalier, growing in leaf litter in mixed woodland

A couple of minutes later, while walking along a river bank under some very old pine trees, I found a big group of cavalier's relatives.

Clouded funnels. There were about a hundred of them on that spot!

Moving on, I found the only truly non-edible mushroom for today, growing on a rotting stump leaning over a stream. That's right, the two species above are edible, although not recommended due to combination of lack of taste and texture, possibility of confusion with similar poisonous species and occasional individual gastric reactions even if correctly identified.

A splash of colour - a welcome change from previous specimens. Brick tuft.
Beautiful, but not edible even when this young

Finally, right next to my office (did I mention that I took the pictures on my way to work today?), a company of ink caps, past their prime, but still looking good enough for a photo.

Remember: it's either eating these, or drinking alcohol. DO NOT combine!

All in all, not a bad photo collection for the last day of October! It has been very mild recently, with lots of rain, hence the relative fungal abundance. I'm sure I'll be back soon with more photos. Meanwhile, stay warm, and don't eat any funny mushrooms!

Botanicula

The journey begins

I came over this unusual game by accident, and still wondering if I should get a full version of it. It is a point and click adventure in which a motley crew of mushrooms and insects are embarking on a journey to plant a seed. It has most adorable sounds and music (if you listen to the tiny squeaks those travelling fungi make, you are guaranteed to fall in love with them after five minutes), and graphics like I have never seen before. Beautiful. And weird (in a good sense).

As for the gameplay, the demo can be played in under a minute if you know what you are doing, but the great thing about this game is that there are so many objects and places you can explore that are not compulsory. The more you click, the more cute animations and adorable sounds you discover.

A full version of Botanicula costs $10, and if you enjoy leisurely meditative puzzles (although, who doesn't?), it is worth every penny.

Mushrooms in the sky...

Or rather, mushroom-shaped cities with the base on the surface of the ocean, with their "caps" rising to 700 metres above sea level. I can't seem to stop thinking about "Green floats" these days.

Shimizu's arcologies may not be practicable, but I love their imagination and ambition. Also, we really need to do something with all that rubbish floating in the ocean. Dealing with the issue by constructing humongous mushrooms is bizarre but also strangely appropriate. After all, fungi are great recyclers. In a video that I posted a while ago, Paul Stamets listed six ways in which fungi can save the world. This might just be the seventh.

Mushroom cities in the Pacific

Concept art for the floating city

I came across this article today, describing the sorry state of the Pacific ocean, which is gradually turning into a rubbish dump, and also a lifeless desert, due to extreme overfishing.

Why write about it in a mushroom blog? Because, according to the same article, fish and mushrooms are the only two wild foods that humans still consume regularly. There is literally nothing else! And, apparently, we are running out of fish, as well as ocean itself.

However, it pleases me that there are dreamers out there working to solve the garbage issue: Shimizu corporation who proposed a concept of a carbon-negative city, freely floating on equatorial ocean currents, recycling all those discarded plastics into building materials and energy.

These cities cannot yet be constructed with the current state of technology, but Shimizu's R&D people are very busy developing them. In 25 years, these will become a reality.

Come to think if it, the place seems to be a very nice retirement spot. And don't those towers look just like giant mushrooms?

Image credit:
Greenfloat city, Shimizu corporation

Soup with Judas' ears

There is a famous Russian cookbook by Yelena Molokhovets, published in 1861, entitled "A gift to young housewives, or the way to decrease expenses in running your household". Its recipes typically start like this: "Boil a whole chicken, keep the stock, and give the chicken away to your servants", or "If you husband has unexpectedly brought home guests, and there is absolutely nothing in the house, don't despair: go to the attic and get a leg of ham..."

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. This weekend I roasted a chicken with lots of herbs and spices, and it seemed to be such a shame just to throw the carcass away after the meat was picked clean off it, so I decided to make some chicken bone soup. Once the stock was strained and ready, I added some chicken meat, frozen sweetcorn and, of course mushrooms.

Just a handful of dried Auricularia auricula-judae.

Normally, when I cook new mushrooms, I tend to be cautious and use just a little bit, but these were pre-packed dried fungi, flown to me all the way from Singapore, so I thought, no need to be shy. I dropped in six, and closed the lid.

Five minutes later, I heard some strange noises coming from the kitchen. The fungi soaked up HALF of the liquid in the pot and were literally crawling out of the pot! (Thankfully, there was more than enough stock in it). The disaster was narrowly avoided only with a hasty transfer to a larger pot. They made for a great soup in the end: a bit leathery in texture, but that was in perfect contrast to sweetcorn and croutons, so the culinary experiment was definitely a success.

Fancy some leathery ears?

That wasn't the end of it though. Next day, I decided to take the remaining fungi out of the soup and give them the standard treatment of frying in butter, because everything tastes better that way, right? Right... Even though I sliced them into thin strips, the explosion in my kitchen was still quite spectacular. Note to self: Judas' ears - soups ONLY. NO frying!

Behind the scenes at Kew Gardens

The short video below gives a behind-the-scenes view of Kew fungarium. It is the largest collection of dried fungi in the world, with 1.25 million samples. As you can see, I am still not over the impression that the current events at Kew Gardens have made on me. Finally, there is an institution that not only recognises the importance of fungi, but also makes a serious attempt to promote this idea to the general public!

It particularly pleases me that their mushroom-oriented programme of events is running over the school holidays and is directed at children. The present attitude to fungi in Britain, which can be summarised as "Stay away from those hideous things!" upsets me greatly, even though it means that I have zero competition while foraging. I'm glad that there are efforts in place to change this. Although, perhaps they shouldn't have named one of their kid-friendly workshops "Hands-on with magical mushrooms"...

Mushrooms at Kew Gardens

These would fill a few freezers...

Being based in Scotland is great for mushroom forays, but sometimes it feels like I'm way too far from the places where exciting things are happening.

Certainly, the new exhibition of fungi sculptures at Kew Gardens is one of such events. The best I could do in this case was to ask a couple of friends to go for a visit and take a few photos.

The pictures are not the best you'll see in this blog, but the subject matter is so great that even these mobile phone snaps look amazing. If only I could do them myself, with a proper camera!

Mmm... morels. One day, I'll find
the real ones!

The sculptor, Tom Hare, used different shades of willow twigs. Look how skilfully he layered them in his morels, to show off the wrinkles and cavities that distinguish this species. My favourite bit though is the underside of porcini mushrooms: the straw from which it is made does a perfect job imitating the spongy hymenium, both in texture and colour. They look... real!

The sculptures are enormous, some over 4 metres in height. Tom Hare's wonderful creations will be decorating the Broad Walk in Kew until 3rd November.

Unexpected finds in Glasgow city centre

This weekend I decided to give myself a bit of rest from any fungal delights (there really can be too much of a good thing) and instead of my usual forest walk went to Glasgow, thinking that I'd be safe among its concrete and stone.

All went well for a while, but then I lost my guard and went through a tiny bit of green space, just a stone's throw away from George Square. The next thing I knew, I was ambushed by this:

A brown birch bolete. In case you have any doubts, that is hosta and rhododendron foliage in the background.

There were several more of these growing in a nice semi-circular formation that had a birch in its centre. The tree could not have been more than 10 years old.

A couple more steps, and I stumbled against a semicircle of these:

Woolly milk cap, associated with the same tree as brown birch boletes.

Already finding it hard to believe my eyes, I turning attention to a nearby pine, also about 10 years old, and got another surprise.

Ugly milk caps, highly prized and commercially gathered in Russia for pickling. Normally associated with mature pine

Following that semicircle, I went deeper into the rhododendron bushes surrounding the pine, and, and...

You've got to be kidding me

How is this even possible? OK, fly agarics that grow in Britain are too toxic to be of any recreational use, but a group of over 30 of them (out of which 17 can be clearly seen in this photo) has no place in the middle of Glasgow. There was that recent case of a psychiatric patient and magic mushrooms though... Maybe it's a tendency.

Much has been said about difficulty of cultivating mycorrhizal mushrooms, but the truth is, cultivating them is not difficult, just extremely random and unpredictable. My experience this weekend shows that, given the right conditions, a most extraordinary array of forest fungi can spring up just from a couple of trees that happened to carry bits of mycelium and were lucky enough to be transplanted to a spot where soil composition, structure, surrounding plants, temperature, moisture and sunlight were exactly right.

From which I conclude that growing forest mushrooms is not an entirely futile cause. We just have to keep trying.

Mushroom gangs

Perhaps not very
appropriate for an article
about edible fungi!

There has been a couple of near identical articles recently in The Telegraph and The Daily Mail about unscrupulous mushroom pickers (coming "mostly from Eastern Europe" of course, where else!) going around fields and forests in Hampshire and stripping "huge tracts of land" bare of fungi, getting huge profits from this year's bumper harvest.

The Daily Mail has a photo of several baby porcini illustrating their article, whereas The Telegraph proudly displays a very nice image of panther caps, which are both very toxic AND psychoactive. Ironically, the latter article contains urgent advice to its readers to arm themselves with guide books, and never ever pick fungi that cannot be identified with absolute certainty. Perhaps they should follow their own advice and start with their photo editor?..

Image credit:
Amanita pantherina

Mushroom festival!

My correspondent reports from St Petersburg, Russia:

"There was a mushroom festival here this weekend!"

Looking at the photos, I just wish I'd been there. Firstly, a spread of various mushrooms found in the Leningrad region (both edible and inedible). presented by St Petersburg mycological society:

It's curious how exactly the same mushrooms and mosses grow so far away from Scotland, but there you are

Some of the mushrooms were for sale, too. Unfortunately, the only ones sold fresh were chanterelles (my friend was greatly disappointed because she was much hoping for saffron milk caps to which I managed to get her addicted in Scotland), but the selection of salted and marinated ones was most impressive.

Catering for every taste

And finally, the centrepiece of the festival: a massive vat of mushroom soup. The charge was £3 per bowl, but apparently it was worth it. They really cooked it in that huge thing! What can I say. Russians. Awesome.

The mushrooms were collected by company "Matreco" in Komi region. According to the sign, the cooks were from
"Russian college of traditional culture". The soup must have been amazing!

Mushroom gardening

Shaggy scalycap, growing under
a cherry tree - a beautiful sight

Mushroom season is clearly at an end. Mycelium in Scottish forests has exhausted all its stored nutrients, and thus very few new fruitbodies are produced. There might still be some stray bay boletes and pearl puffballs popping out, so I might make one or two more foraging trips this year, but this looks like a good moment to put this blog into a winter mode, with three posts a week instead of five.

It has been a reasonably good season. Not as amazingly spectacular as promised by national news back in August, but I still managed to stock my freezer with a few kilograms of fine porcini, not to mention all the fresh wild mushroom dishes that I'd cooked for my long-suffering family over the summer and early autumn. They are openly relieved that wild fungi will be off menu for a while!

There is no longer any pressure to bring home "the goods", so it was easier to pay more attention to purely aesthetic qualities of fungi I encountered. It is curious that while the edibles are all but spent, all other kinds just keep jumping out of the ground, adding colour and texture to parks, lawns and gardens. Consider the scalycap fungus pictured above: I found it at the edge of a communal garden, and it certainly looks like someone planted the flowers around it to create a perfect composition, in anticipation of its emergence as the centrepiece of the floral composition.

A group of Paxillus validus

Or take the next picture, a group of Paxillus validus, lovely brown and golden fungi (closely related to brown roll rims) that I spotted growing next to the Riverside museum in Glasgow this weekend. The area where they are sprouting has only recently been developed, and as such it only features fairly small tree saplings on standard-issue grass cover. How fortunate that the roots of those saplings were carrying fungal mycelium! It will take many years for the place to become a real park, but in the meantime the mushrooms successfully manage to break the monotony of generic planted landscape, and make the place look so much closer to nature.

Decorative mushroom gardening? Not as preposterous as it sounds!

Fantastic fungi

I have to confess that I absolutely love time-lapse videos of growing fungi, and the one below, featuring Paul Stametz, is in my opinion one of the finest of its kind.

I have to say that do not agree with his view that nature is "intelligent": it is true that it is a very intricate system that can do very complicated things (maintaining balance in ecosystems is one that immediately comes to mind), but it certainly does not possess intelligence in the way humans do.

However, I admire his dedication to all things fungi, and greatly looking forward to the mushroom paradise that he is promising to mankind.

If you are normal...

Some mushrooms
are better left alone

... you go searching for mushrooms. No, really - according to this article. I read it with a mixture of pleasure and annoyance. Pleasure - because people in the US are finally recognising that not all mushrooms are evil, and that wild mushroom pickers are not necessarily prospective patients of psychiatric hospitals (the title definitely suggests that it is a possibility).

Annoyed, well - so many reasons. Firstly, why do you have to pay 200 bucks a day to hire a mushroom guide? Seriously, you pay me that much, and I'll show you ALL my mushrooming spots. Any takers? Hmm, ok, moving on.

The main annoyance is the tone of the article of course - hey, look, these weird Russians, they don't even know how to cook mushrooms properly! Also, the reference to WWII was rather inappropriate. "anti-tank trenches[...], which are ideal for mushrooms". Those trenches were created during the Siege of Leningrad. I'd find some other place to pick my mushrooms, just to avoid those ancestral memories. Of course, you cannot expect an American to understand that. After all, they still believe that they won that war...

Image credit:
Anti-tank obstacle and plaque: "Front line of Leningrad defence. 1941-44"

Brown roll rim

Paxillus involutus

Many people are scared of poisonous fungi such as death caps, or destroying angels, or deadly web caps, which kill you quickly, painfully, and reliably. Fungal poisoning though can be more subtle than that. Meet the brown roll rim, the fungus that could kill you after you'd eaten it one hundred times with no ill effects. That one last time, it causes an autoimmune reaction in its victims that destroys red blood cells, ultimately causing kidney failure. It is not a cumulative poison, as some sources suggest. The exact reasons why some, but not all, instances of brown roll rim consumption result in serious illness, are not known.

Because deaths by brown roll rims are so rare, the toxicity of this mushroom has not been recognised until recently. Indeed, in parts of Central and Eastern Europe it is still consumed, sometimes in great quantities, as evidenced by the photo below.

Looks great, but these are not for me

I have to admit that this species highlights a serious issue with wild food generally: in truth, you never can have a total guarantee that the stuff you bring in from the forest is safe. There are no biological, chemical or radiological controls to reassure you, unlike in big supermarkets (although, the recent horsemeat burger scandal shows that even their procedures are not 100% reliable).

Fortunately, with properly identified edible mushrooms the risk is minimal. But brown roll rims? No matter how inviting that pot of cooked mushrooms looks, I'm giving it a miss.

Image credits:
Paxillus involutus
Cooked brown roll rim (personal communication)

Meanwhile, in the East...

Mushroom season here in Scotland is ending, but this is clearly not the case in other places. Consider this foraging report I got from a friend in Germany:

Ceps, lurid boletes and a few bay boletes - very nice haul!

But it is the Ukrainian report that makes me truly jealous. Saffron milk caps. SAFFRON MILK CAPS!!

Maybe I'm living in a wrong country...