magnificent mushrooms
In the moss and tangles of fallen branches, there are marvels to be found. The orange candelabra of Calocera, earthstars that puff clouds of spores like smoke, bright red fly agaric among birches. You never know what you might discover in the woods. Mushrooms have long excited creative imaginations. Sigmund Freud loved hunting them – mysteries and surprises wait in the quiet corners of nature. So did the composer John Cage, who had a lifelong fascination with fungi. And Beatrix Potter might never have given us Peter Rabbit if her beautifully illustrated mycological research hadn’t been declined for publication by the 19th-century patriarchs of the Linnean Society of biologists.
Fungi’s processes, and their power to feed, cure,. ‘We are unthinkable without fungi,’ he recently wrote, ‘yet seldom do we think about them. It is an ignorance we can’t afford to sustain.’ Yet less than 8 per cent of the world’s fungi have been scientifically described.
