The autumn months of course are when fungi is at it’s most extravagant because this is when most of them produce their fruiting bodies which appear above ground in order to disperse their spore and multiply. Wet summers provide optimum conditions.

The vast majority of the plant is underground and can cover huge distances linking trees, conveying information, it is thought, about dangers and conditions. Although fungi are reliant on a host (leaf litter, a tree, rotting wood) very few are parasitic and they really help the ecosystem by breaking down dying and dead matter and holding soil together.

I love the aesthetic nature of fungi, which can amaze us with it’s stunning displays and sheer exuberance, providing staircases up trees, gorgeous red or orange caps or emerging like ghostly white fingers from rotting wood.

Many of us use the word mushroom for something we might eat, toadstool for something we might not and fungi for everything else…like lichen and yeast. In fact they are all fungi and mushroom and toadstool are really interchangeable and merely tend to refer to the stalk and cap shape of what may be called Higher Fungi…the prettier ones I guess!

There seems to be vast disparity between estimated number of fungi species in the UK and I’ve seen claims of 3,500 and 14,000 which is confusing for the amateur.

People often are nervous about touching them because some can cause death/ illness if eaten, or a skin reaction…but these are relatively few. On the continent there is an established culture of foraging and experimentation with wild food of all kinds and some countries employ special “Mushroom Inspectors”. In 2020 about 350 ‘mushroom checking stations’ operated in Switzerland where pickers could get their finds checked as to whether they were safe to eat. There is now concern that this service is dwindling and reliance on photos and on-line identification is resulting in fatalities! Perhaps the British are wise to be nervous though a seems a shame to miss out on the variety of free wild food around us.

The humidity and rotting vegetation in mixed woodland, is ideal for finding a huge variety of fungi but there are species which have adapted to all sorts of conditions from chalk, sand dunes, bricks and even plastic. Fungi is essential to our ecosystem and, it seems, one of nature’s success stories so book yourself on a fungi foray next time you see one advertised and prepare to be amazed!