FUNGI FASCINATION

Cycling through a woodland one Sunday evening in early June, I was brought to a shuddering halt by the sight of a large creamy coloured mushroom the size of a dinner plate that had recently sprouted from a tree stump like an alien flower. Just a week later, passing along the same track, I found that the mushroom had collapsed in on itself like a badly cooked soufflé.

Fungi are startlingly different from other life forms on Earth – something that Merlin Sheldrake noticed early in life. His childhood curiosity was piqued by these bizarre, largely invisible organisms that seemed to have so much power to transform one thing into another. “They appear very fast, and then they vanish again,” he says. “There’s a mystery to them – where do they come from, where are they going?”

Merlin is now a biologist specialising in fungi, and his book , published last year,