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 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!

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"

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...

This might be infectious...

Wonderful crop from Ukraine

I have a Ukrainian friend who has never been interested in collecting mushrooms. She is (or maybe was - see below) a committed gardener. If you have read Karel Čapek's The Gardener's Year, you'll know what I'm talking about. If not, I have placed my translation of the Gardener's prayer from the book at the bottom of this post, so that you can get the idea.

Anyway, our previous discussions of fungi were usually limited to the ways of preventing phytophthora growth on her potatoes, tomatoes and other fruits of her allotment. So I was more than mildly shocked when she skyped me today, and the whole half hour of our conversation was spent showing the mushrooms she picked in some faraway forest. She had to get up at 5am to get there and back in one day! Even I'm not manic enough to do that.

I did take her mushrooming a couple of times when she visited me this summer, and she didn't show much enthusiasm then. I now suspect that local ticks carry a foraging bug which, like Lime disease, takes its time to incubate. Well, what can I say - welcome to the club!

---

Gardener's prayer, from The Gardener's Year by Karel Čapek

‘O Lord, grant us rain every day, from about midnight until three o’clock in the morning, and let it be gentle and warm so that the earth can soak it in; but make sure it would not rain on campion, alyssum, helianthemum, lavender, and the others which you in your infinite wisdom know are drought-loving plants; I can make you a list of their names if you need me to – and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long, but not in all places (for instance, not on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron), and let it not be too hot; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough earthworms, no woodlice or slugs, no mildew, and let once a week liquid manure and pigeon's droppings fall from heaven. Amen.’

Beatrix Potter, a Victorian naturalist

Souvenirs from the Armitt Museum

My recent visit to Lake District was centred mostly around nature trails and dogspotting, as well as doing weird things such as scaring goldfish living in a telephone box next to a pub in Torver, and giving a traffic cone a tour of the Northern lakes (the latter was my companion's idea, and I swear we were not eating any funny mushrooms... although, after having written this down, I am not entirely sure). However, there was one cultural experience, and that was a visit to the Armitt Museum in Ambleside. It would have been just another local history museum but for one remarkable woman who lived in the area for for most of her life bequeathed to it her archives: Beatrix Potter.

Now, everyone knows that she is a highly acclaimed children's author, the writer who brought to us the tales of Peter Rabbit and his friends, in which charming and simple text is accompanied by beautiful illustrations. In my opinion, these illustrations are a major factor in the success of her books, as it is thanks to them that the stories and characters in them are really brought to life.

Illustration to "The Tale of Squirrel
Nutkin" (spot the mushrooms!)

What is not so well known is that before writing her first Peter Rabbit story she was a passionate amateur mycologist, and that her legacy includes hundreds of fungi drawings, so detailed and accurate that after more than 100 years they are still easily identifiable. She was also the first person to prove that fungi propagated by spores and managed to germinate them (among her drawings there are her observations of this process through a microscope). She also was the first (in Britain) to suggest that fungi and algae comprising lichens are symbiotic rather than parasitic. Altogether remarkable! She even submitted a paper to the Linnean Society on the subject of spore germination, but it was never published, almost certainly due to some power play of the people in charge. And, almost certainly, because she was a woman. Arrgh, Victorians!

It must have been a great disappointment for her, but there is something we have to thank those eggheads. I am sure that their refusal to publish her paper spurred her to try her hand at a different kind of publication, and a good children's book is much better than any scientific paper, especially one that actually has such significant educational value: her illustrations of plants and English countryside are extremely accurate, even though her description of animal habits is certainly not! I am deeply saddened though that one thing is missing from them: fungi. Except for one illustration to "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin", all she ever drew for Peter Rabbit was plants. Perhaps that experience at the Linnean cut deeper than her biographers thought, as after it she gradually stopped producing fungi drawings altogether.

Back from Lake District

Disappoint

Wow, what a journey. Great for scenery, not so great for mushrooms. Yep. I went to Lake District in mushroom season, and all I brought back was a crappy photo of an earthball. No trophies, alas.

I did visit Armitt museum in Ambleside and its exhibition of Beatrix Potter's fungi watercolours. Too tired now to do a proper post about it, but will be back with a full report on Monday.