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!