Lovely Morning in a Local Wood.
12th October 2022
Yesterday Susan and I went looking for Fungi in a local conifer plantation – it’s that time of year. The best time to look is after a couple of days of rain, so we were hopeful of finding some photographable subjects and indeed we came across some lovely displays of the.
‘Poisonous’ Sulphur Tuft mushrooms on rotting tree stumps.
In order to save walking around with equipment unnecessarily, we always carry binoculars because this helps you to see across the woodland floor. However, nothing could have prepared us for the spectacle which appeared before us - hundreds of Chanterelle mushrooms in groups of up to fifty, and probably in total over a thousand throughout the woods.
This was a veritable natural wonder and a pleasure to behold.
If these mushrooms had been true Chanterelles they would have been worth a fortune, but unfortunately true Chanterelles, a highly prized, delicious and very expensive mushroom, appear in mid to late summer and grow in primarily deciduous woodlands. These were in fact False Chanterelles and are not edible because they can give people bad gastric problems and some people have experienced hallucinatory episodes after consumption.
On casual observation it is easy to confuse these two species but with closer inspection, (which is highly recommended), there are marked differences between the two, principally colour, gills or the lack of and distinctive odour.
Both examples of False Chanterelle.
Overall just remember if they are in a conifer woodland in the autumn then they are most likely to be the inedible false species which should not be consumed.
This however, made no difference to a glorious panorama that would brighten up any woodland. We walked on through a mixture of habitats through lovely settings with the sun’s dappled rays illuminating the woodland floor and pleasingly in total silence, which is a rare commodity in today’s world. We stopped to examine and photograph a number of species as we made our way through but then totally unexpectedly we came across a mushroom we always like to see.
The Fly Agaric.
They brightens up any walk and although these mushrooms have a very close mycorrhizal relationship with Birch trees as we found, they are also discovered in conifer plantations. These lovely mushrooms look like they are straight out of a children’s book of fairy stories.
I was only too happy to take a few shots as they rounded off the morning perfectly.
‘Poisonous’ Sulphur Tuft mushrooms on rotting tree stumps.
In order to save walking around with equipment unnecessarily, we always carry binoculars because this helps you to see across the woodland floor. However, nothing could have prepared us for the spectacle which appeared before us - hundreds of Chanterelle mushrooms in groups of up to fifty, and probably in total over a thousand throughout the woods.
This was a veritable natural wonder and a pleasure to behold.
If these mushrooms had been true Chanterelles they would have been worth a fortune, but unfortunately true Chanterelles, a highly prized, delicious and very expensive mushroom, appear in mid to late summer and grow in primarily deciduous woodlands. These were in fact False Chanterelles and are not edible because they can give people bad gastric problems and some people have experienced hallucinatory episodes after consumption.
On casual observation it is easy to confuse these two species but with closer inspection, (which is highly recommended), there are marked differences between the two, principally colour, gills or the lack of and distinctive odour.
Both examples of False Chanterelle.
Overall just remember if they are in a conifer woodland in the autumn then they are most likely to be the inedible false species which should not be consumed.
This however, made no difference to a glorious panorama that would brighten up any woodland. We walked on through a mixture of habitats through lovely settings with the sun’s dappled rays illuminating the woodland floor and pleasingly in total silence, which is a rare commodity in today’s world. We stopped to examine and photograph a number of species as we made our way through but then totally unexpectedly we came across a mushroom we always like to see.
The Fly Agaric.
They brightens up any walk and although these mushrooms have a very close mycorrhizal relationship with Birch trees as we found, they are also discovered in conifer plantations. These lovely mushrooms look like they are straight out of a children’s book of fairy stories.
I was only too happy to take a few shots as they rounded off the morning perfectly.