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.