There’s this story in Scottish folklore: A king (Scottish or Pictish) and his army were engaged in a long campaign to repel the Danish invaders who were terrorising the east coast. The Vikings knew that the only way to gain free access to the rich breadbasket lands and the treasures of the religious houses was to defeat the king’s army, which was camped, exhausted, by a river, thinking itself safe for at least a night’s sleep. The Viking spies located the army. and to gain advantage by stealth and secrecy, the warriors began to creep up on foot, swords drawn, and surround them. Thinking their boots made too much noise, the leader ordered his men to go barefoot. Their goal was in sight, until a skull-splitting screech and an unrepeatable Scandinavian oath filled the air. One of the Vikings had trodden on a well-armed Spear Thistle. The kings army were thus warned, and sprang to action to repel the invaders. Since when, the thistle has always been the emblem of Scotland.
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Last Sunday was the first of the seriously cold days of this winter. It will get colder, but we will have adjusted to it. Nevertheless,it was still warmer outside than in our currently challenged-in-the-heating-department house, so we decided to go for a walk to warm up.
As we sauntered along the footpath from Luncarty to the River Tay, almost a hollow lane, beads of frost and frozen droplets of moisture clung to any material they encountered. Ephemeral, discarded threads pf spider gossamer waved like chilly bunting. Touch one, and it evaporated. Frizzy, curled husks of ice-tipped willow herb seedheads towered as if frozen.
A haar descended. Generally the haar creeps upriver from Perth; today it seemed to come from all directions. Its gloom, exacerbated by the knowledge that somewhere behind it the sun is weakly shining, has the coldest feel imaginable. With wreaths of steam-like fog and mist flowing above the surface, the Tay resembled an Icelandic hot spring.
The river path proper starts at the site of the old Waulkmill Chain Ferry – once the only convenient way to cross from one side to the other. It closed as late as 1964, but I think this must have been a crossing point for many centuries before the chain ferry and pontoons were in operation. We headed in the direction of Perth City, watching gigantic pylons loom up from the cold dense air, bringing to mind the Martians from H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds.
And then we came to the derelict bulk of old buildings beside Denmarkfield Farm, and the unmarked stone that stands in the weedy, thistle-infested ground just above the river. Here, locals say, is the site of that momentous battle that propelled the Scots thistle to prominence, and the stone – called the King’s Stone – marks the spot. That’s why the place, and later the farm, have been called Denmarkfield ever since.
There are plans to build yet another road, the Cross Tay Link Road, from here to Scone on the east bank. The land around the King’s Stone (actually far older than the 10th century) is under a compulsory purchase order. As people speed over the new bridge that will cross the river, congratulating themselves on the ease and convenience, will anyone remember the Waulkmill ferryman, the king who slept by the river, or the Viking with a sore foot?
I had thought my days of being torpid and uncomfortable in a cold house were a thing of the past. But an unfortunate tangle with a renewable energy company apparently having major hiccups and losing the plot – at least of our contracts – have found us without heating or hot water for a month and contemplating, in early December, whether this was as bad as other cold houses I have known and loved (in summer)?
First there was the single-brick construction of a bungalow called Berberis, in rural Essex. It boasted single glazed windows in rotting, leaking frames, a total absence of insulation and a rickety “hot” water cylinder perched above a bath, where humans, clothes, linen and everything else had to get washed. There was, of course, no heating – but there was a tiny fireplace in each of the four rooms. The first winter I spent there (1985-6, one of the coldest of the century), I didn’t have the slightest idea how to light a fire in a grate, having been raised as a gas-fitter’s daughter. I was also completely skint, a student, and alone.
I decided I could afford a calor gas heater, which did wonders for increasing the condensation and mould on the walls. As the winter progressed, good friends and relations rallied round, taught me how to light fires, brought me logs (which I cut up with my father’s carpentry saw), and helped rig up clingfilm double glazing over all the whistling windows and their holey frames, draught-proofing for the doors, and thick material for curtains. I slept in the warmest of the bedrooms (the one which didn’t have rattling French doors), in a woolly hat, under a mountain of inherited blankets, with an axe by my side and a tiny fire in the grate.
The second winter, after a summer of falling in love with the house and with my own self-sufficiency, I wasn’t alone, and we spent a good deal of it roasting chestnuts and making babies in front of a roaring fire of logs scavenged from local woods.
Berberis was certainly challenging, but perhaps the challenges were easier to combat than those of the huge, high-ceilinged “tied house” that was our first home in Scotland a few years later. Did I mention that it literally sat on the beach? And that at spring tides, the waves actually broke onto the walls and windows? It was an impressive building, designed by Robert Adam, and an incredible joy to move to in April from the claustrophobic and embittered south east of England, and to live in with our two babies all through the summer. But Adam never intended it to be a home. It was a rather ornamental, converted laundry. Most of the massive, single glazed windows looked onto the sea (amazing views of sea otters and Arran). There was one wood burning stove in the cavernous living room, and a couple of gravity fed radiators up stairs by the lukewarm-and-no-more water tank.
The house on a beach
As winter approached, the shortcomings of the stove became apparent. The biggest problem was fuel. Part of the tied-house deal was that the estate foresters supplied all the tenants with wood for burning. They weren’t our biggest fans on several counts. One, we had English accents, full stop, and were seen to be in cahoots with the higheidyins (also English). This wasn’t justified, but hey. Two, said higheidyins had asked my partner to put forward his ideas on the ornamental trees on the estate. He took them at their word and (never the best diplomat) incensed the head forester who saw all trees as under his sole jurisdiction. Three, and worst of all, to accommodate the arrival of a family of four, one of the forestry team had been moved out under protest from this house where he’d lived alone for several years. Thus, it was that, when we asked for logs, they took a long time to arrive and were the wettest, greenest, least calorific bits of spruce that could be found. Whereas everyone else got them ready split and chopped, we had to process them ourselves (reasonable enough, given we had the equipment – but they were also impossibly knotty).
Appealing to the Trust for help with heating led to the delivery to the kitchen of a second-hand solid fuel range. It turned out to be cobbled out of an oil fed system, and wouldn’t work. The kitchen floor was concrete, with no floor coverings, and we couldn’t afford to buy any. With only one of us earning a gardener’s wage, and the occupancy of a tied house being reckoned to make our income double what it was, thus making us ineligible for any benefits, we were snookered. I began to get chilblains, and had to stand on a pad of old newspapers when washing up or cooking. For a while I tried cutting the dead meadowsweet stems from by the burn for floor coverings, but though they smelt nice, they didn’t really help. Our small daughter wet the bed. Our son, eighteen months old, developed sleep problems and would wake us all every night. For some reason, we didn’t connect it with the fall in temperatures, but did notice he was kicking off his cot blanket. So, we got him used to a proper bed where the blankets could be tucked in, and moved him into a downstairs bedroom which had smaller windows not facing the Atlantic gales. It also got the morning sun. He still woke most nights to start with, and I’ll never know if the eventual improvement was down to location or the weather just improving.
Meanwhile, I raged at the impossible range and the recalcitrant stove, wore gloves indoors, and spent as much of each day as I could tramping the estate with the babies to keep warm. My partner in a fit of temper one day threw a shovelful of coal into the stove. I assumed the stove would blow up, being a wood-burner, but instead it actually grew quite hot for once. Right enough 90% of said heat disappeared immediately five metres up to the ceiling. For another day, we fed it bits of coal, like feeding an addict tiny amounts of a drug to control its habit.
And guess what? The chimney breast began to roar, loudly, and became too hot to touch. Then flames issued from the 18th century chimney. The days were icy, even at sea level, and the track down the cliff to the house was too dangerous for the fire engine to use, because the estate team had overlooked our track when gritting. The fire-persons (the leader was a woman) descended on a sledge with the firehose and some equipment, and put the fire out in three hours. To do so, they broke a huge hole into the flue, rendering it unusable. It hadn’t occurred to us that the chimneys might not have been swept for years. Who knows, the ineffectiveness of the stove may not have been solely down to the logs.
After that, grudgingly, a better range (still recycled from another property) and a rudimentary heating system were put in by the Trust. By then it was spring, of course. The joys of tied houses. But we left there the following winter, for a remote, off-grid smallholding with a working solid fuel range and a pot-bellied stove where we put up a wind generator and often got snowed in a week at a time. It was positively toasty!
I really hope our energy company’s problems get sorted, that at some point we move up on their list of priorities, and we can achieve, again, carbon neutral hot water and a warm house. I know there are worse positions to be in. In that Adam laundry, ten degrees celsius was a good temperature – not that my study is even achieving that on cold mornings at present. Now, at least, we have a brilliant woodburning stove that never goes out, even when you need it to, to empty the ash. We can afford to put on temporary convector heaters, although it still goes against the grain. Never, ever, undervalue the bliss and luxury of hot water in the tap.
I pause on my way through the woods, quieting my breathing, keeping as still as I can. There is no sound, there is no wind. There should be no movement. Yet within the vascular systems of the broadleaved trees that bound the track, small enzyme changes are at work, invisible changes that lead to letting go, abscission, leaf-fall.
And down they come, silent, slow, like snowflakes in a still winter’s night. There is no flurry, no sound of wind through dry foliage, just the falling. Just the peace. Some trees are bare already. Birches are among the first to blaze golden and lose their leaves. Oaks keep hold of theirs till the last, but then they are usually the last to open in spring. Mature trees abscise before young ones. Young trees, and trees that have been pruned, will produce what’s known as juvenile growth, one feature of which being that the processes of leaf-fall are delayed. That’s why beech trees are so popular for hedges, the dry, crackly leaves slipping from gold to brown and staying in place till spring.
Young beeches, self-sown among the conifers at Taymount Wood’s dark heart, shine like tawny beacons.
They coat the ground, these last leaves, slick with last night’s rain and the condensing sweat of mist that loiters in motionless, tangled branches. Small sweeps of the already fallen lie around sedges and rushes, in hidden puddles and ditches. What else do they conceal?
A small brown toad lurks unmoving as the day, camouflaged among old birch leaves at the path edge. Then he moves, lopes distractedly into the grass, and is visible.
I like the emergence into visibility of the toad, and I enjoy the wood revealing its secrets as the leaves fall. The bizarre jutting side-branch of a fir tree, and the even more inexplicable branch that has fallen over it like a necktie, and somehow grown into an A shape. The filigree, waterfalling twigs of bare birch trees. The holes in trunks and large branches, the red squirrel’s aerial expressway from tree to tree. When leaves fall, I see that some trees are still richly clothed, decked in lichens and mosses so profusely you can’t see the wood, and decorated with the jewels of fruit and fungi. Food, forage and habitat here for small creatures that depend on the woods through the winter.
By the King’s Myre, the stillness of the day is magnified by the strange open vastness of this stretch of water. Reeds and trees and overhanging trees are reflected; birds are absent or silent. In the boats drawn up to the jetty, the leaves lie in rain that’s collected there, the sky bounces back, grey, metallic, motionless. There are no wafting clouds; it is all cloud, all greyness. And more leaves unhook themselves from life, drift down soberly against the small frictions of the early winter air.
On twigs and branches, wherever a leaf falls, a small tight bud, wrapped unnoticed in its winter coat, remains and waits.
I always liked stones. I collected pebbles on the beach from childhood, and in my teens followed my sister around Ayrshire beaches where the pebbles had magical names – jaspar, carnelian, agate, onyx. I went to the Leadhills in search of galena. I polished stones with carborundum, to little effect.
And, secretly, I developed the habit of having a special stone, of no particular value save that it caught my eye and fitted in my palm, in the pocket of every jacket.
I liked big stones, too, stones with human names and imprints – the menhirs of West Cornwall, the cairns and ring-marked rocks of Mid-Argyll, the carved stones of Pictland. I had no better idea than any expert why they were placed where they were, or what the painstaking sculptures were for. But I knew the people who made stone circles kept pebbles in their pockets, too.
In some kinds of stone, I invested more thought than in others. Granite: shards of feldspar, glittering quartz and the now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t shine of mica. The stone that made up Dartmoor tors, Scottish mountains and an unlikely acid-soiled, heather-clad, craggy-topped park near Leicester. Gritstone: hard-working rock of wind and watermills, a sharp, scraped, glowering edge in the Dark Peak. Quartzite: white, altered stones casting spells on Schiehallion, the fairy hill.
What were these rocks? Where did they begin? How did they get here? Where will they end? Why are they different? Why do they paint different pictures on a landscape? Why did that Leicester park make me feel I was in Scotland?
I found out most of the answers by studying Geology and Environment through the Open University, alongside biological sciences. One day on a field trip as I stood with others sketching outcrops, bedding planes and all the various features before me, I suddenly saw it. The landscape which had left crooked teeth of rock strata from one extreme to the other of my field of vision was once a monstrous anticline – one of scarcely imaginable proportions, like an outrageous rainbow. At some point it had collapsed on ancient fault lines. Before these rock strata had formed the bow, pushed up by plutonic forces, they had quietly lain flat and growing, at the bottom of a deep and ancient, long gone sea. I had found a new dimension to reading a landscape – one that underlay all the others.
As I moved towards completing my degree, two options loomed. Rocks? Or plants? Geologist or gardener? I chose plants, but continued to collect stones, embrace menhirs and mentally compute the past from the present view wherever I could.
And so, one wet, unwelcoming day, we walked the coast path in Berwickshire to Siccar Point, in the footsteps of James Hutton, Hugh Miller and all the great Scottish fathers of geology who had embraced with reluctance or excitement truths about the age of the Earth and the forces behind its formation, all revealed in the inconvenient truth of rocks not being where they were supposed to be.
Hutton’s Unconformity.
The wind was fierce and uncompromising. I trembled on the famous cliff, and understood why Hutton had gone by boat. Deposition, uplift, volcanic forces and metamorphic sleight-of-hand. Readable by some, wondered at by many, denied by others. I collected no pebble, no souvenir. Just the imprint of the wind, cold as stone, mutable as stone.
Post-abscission, clear buttercup yellow, Glowing, brimming, laughing leaves, Backlit by unseen candles in the soil,
Dancing to proud chestnut speckling, Here a tear, there a ragged edge, Tawny shadows cluster.
Form altered, yet perfect, Loveliness of mottling, deep riven veins, Clarity of soft, yellow margins.
No stage of this fading Worth more or less than the last, Or the next.
Burnished by rain, age spots darken, Host to unimagined organisms. Veins grow thin, but flow golden yet,
And when this encompassing brown darkens and crumbles, Becomes indivisible with soil, When nettles push back through the earth And the chrysalis breaks apart
I roll out the mat and obediently stand, facing the window where the morning rain can be seen drip-drip-dripping from mouldering leaves and a hole in the gutter. I connect my body with the earth. My eyes, however, watch as the blackbird, steadily working his way through all the tiny red apples on the weeping crab, is joined by a song thrush. The thrush hasn’t been seen for months, and is initially more concerned with preening the rain from his wings and tail, until he assesses there to be no challenge from the blackbird, and tucks in heartily.
Lulled into repetitive, soothing xi-gong type exercises, my body goes into autopilot as I watch a long-tailed tit hacking away at a suet block in the bird feeder. Coal tits and bluetits buzz in and out from the communal vantage point of the crab apple, to feed on seed and fat-balls. A dapper wee collared dove paces up and down beneath, hoovering up the fat-ball crumbs the small birds dislodge and drop.
As I breathe, and stretch, and occasionally forget to do either in precisely the right order, I note that the Michaelmas Daisies are soggy, but still going, and there is plenty of seed still on the crystal-spattered heads of Hemp Agrimony. I note also that to human eyes in search of order it’s a mess. Shall I cut it down, or will the goldfinches be back to harvest more seedy meals? Of course, I’ll leave the mess.
I have watched my neighbour across the road leave her house and drive down the brae, but there is something moving around at the bottom of her garden, among the rhododendrons. Who would be gardening in the pouring rain? Ducking temporarily under the watchful eye of my phone, and thus my yoga teacher, I suspend an impossible balance to look more closely. Identifiable by their creamy backsides, two burgling roe deer are gently browsing their way along the hedge-line, looking for a gap in the fence that they know fine well isn’t there. They are bold, flexible, relaxed and insouciant. They have been doing yoga all their lives.
The impossible balance has not become easier in my brief absence.
The deer dissolve into the flame-red autumn colour of next door’s maple trees. I hold a lunge a little too long while drinking in the full spectrum of colours of this year’s leaves, the brown of the rowan tree, clear yellow of the golden elder, peaches and oranges and tangerines dripping from a cherry tree. There is no wind, but the weight of water pushes tawny leaves from the russet apple tree, revealing huge, perfect apples still to be harvested.
The class moves happily into a movement called the dipping bird. I enjoy this, and execute a fair number of dipping birds with relish, until I spot an obese woodpigeon eyeing me through the glass with cold contempt. I’d like to see him do it, that’s all.
I wonder where the other birds have gone. Have they spotted intruders? Luckily, we are all muted. I would not have liked everyone to hear the expletive I came out with as the roe deer nonchalantly appeared on MY lawn in front of MY crab apple and began to work their way through MY shrub border. I duck again under the camera, and open the window to shout at them. They don’t even look startled, but condescend to lazily squeeze through the hedge into the no-man’s-land that will take them back to the stubble field. I hope they haven’t eaten my kale.
Relaxation time, and I’m back under the radar, feeling suitably stretched and folded like a good sourdough. Wildlife watching is a secret benefit of online classes. I wonder if, when we met in a hall, my yoga teacher realised how much time I spent watching clouds, the wind in the trees and passing seagulls through the high-up windows?
There is, really, only one easy way into and out of Five Mile Wood – at least in October. That’s from the south end on the Stanley to New Mill cottages road – currently a bit of a no man’s land thanks to the dualling of the A9. Here the track is clear, broad, made for forestry vehicles – and you can even park! At the north end, there is also the old straight track I’ve written about before, from South Barns and beyond that, with a diversion to Bankfoot. Follow the line of this track and it will take you to Dunkeld, once a mighty ecclesiastical seat. I learned last week that from Dunkeld to the wood it’s five miles – hence the name.
I wonder what happened to One, Two, Three and Four Mile Woods?
But once through the gate at the end of the straight track, the going is tricky. At this time of year, wellies are essential, thanks to the legacy of ditches, boggy ground and waterlogging that followed the felling of the trees here. When did it become the norm for forestry practice to leave such a mess? However, with care, agility and thanks to the enterprising actions of previous walkers using felled timber to ford the worst ditches, you can get to the main path that circles the wood.
Deer, birds and other animals have their own paths off into the undergrowth, but for humans, the area where trees were felled before the Commission ceased to work are becoming impenetrable, Gorse crowds thickly on either side of the track, requiring constant maintenance to keep it from meeting in the middle. Self-seeded birch, larch, Scots pine and willow are all growing well, but there are no paths between them in this baby wood. Then there are the trackside deep ditches, another legacy of forest drainage operations, not impossible to cross but very off-putting.
So walkers, joggers and cyclists stick to the circular path and leave the wood by the way they came. Someone on Trip Advisor found the wood disappointing, and the circular track through felled forest boring. But I wonder. We undervalue landscapes that aren’t “finished” – such as newly planted gardens and self-seeded woods at the start of succession. The prettiest part of Five Mile Wood may be the winding bike-track under mature trees which shoots off from the main path near the south entrance, but the burgeoning growth of pioneer vegetation in the centre – the “gap site” as some call it – is vibrant with hidden life, resounding with the flickering flight of small birds and bubbling with amphibians and aquatic life in the ponds and ditches created for drainage. Even the nuisance gorse is a rich nectar source for pollinators and home, each bush, to thousands of spiders and other invertebrates. It’s not what we are schooled to believe beautiful, but in terms of ecology and resilience, it is every bit as valid as ancient oak climax woodland. Not all landscapes can be measured in human terms – though the amount of carbon sequestered by rapidly-growing trees and shrubs will be enormous and far greater than that in a carefully-planned, gardenesque setting. And humans need carbon sinks as much as every other life form.
People like to have choices, though. Choices about where to enter the wood – entrance points close to all the settlements that lie within walking distance. New tracks to follow, new routes to explore, the chance to come out into the sunshine at a different point from where you went in. Paths that cross, diversions, sidetracks, viewpoints. I don’t think they should be the main focus of the wood, or dominate the richness of undisturbed wildlife in the centre. There must be places that are no-go areas for humans, where nature can get on with it, and prove, as ever, that she will make a better job of it than we can.
And then, let our tracks meet and link wood to wood, as we learn to walk more, and be more in nature and less apart from it. Then we will lose our expectations of park furniture and entertainment, and realise the woods aren’t, in the end, all about us.
First, let me make it understood: the narrow path at the back between our house and an unruly hedge of ghastly snowberries and virulent ivy is a no-go area we rarely check up on till the ivy taps on the one narrow window in that wall. This is how the bee boxes went un-noticed.
A hive of bees blocked off the entrance to that path for many years. It also made the lovely south-facing corner of the garden a bit of a no-go area for maintenance in summer, until we tired of the feeling that the woods were devouring the house, and moved the bees to the farm where we grow fruit trees, and the ministrations of better beekeepers. However, there have always been feral bees in Bankfoot (to which we may at times have contributed – but surely not), so we kept what’s known as a bait hive there, in case a swarm was looking for somewhere to take up residence. It’s basically an empty hive with some honey scented frames of ready-to-build honeycomb inside. If they did, and if all went well, they too would be moved to the farm.
This worked in 2019, and again in spring this year. A big, exuberant swarm arrived in May (clearly worth their load of hay). We left them to settle and establish, partly because we’re busy/lazy/unprepared, but also because whenever we interfere too much with bees, something seems to go wrong. Bees, in my experience, know what they’re doing far better than we do. I confess, I know all the theory, but am a terrible beekeeper. Sadly, on this occasion, we were all helpless in the face of pesticide poisoning. The bees started coming home in dribs and drabs, crawling around witless on the patio and unable to reach the hive, many dying with their probosces (tongues in the vernacular) protruding. The whole colony was killed; whether from agricultural blitzkrieg or over-enthusiastic wannabe gardeners in lockdown, I’ll never know. We put the boxes and frames on the bonfire in case the other honeybees that came to rob the undefended honey got poisoned by it, and cleared the site.
One day at the beginning of August, John and Linda called for a garden visit while we were out. When we got back, John said, “See your bees are doing well, very active today.”
“No, no, we don’t have bees, they were poisoned. That’ll just be robbers still smelling the old hive.” John looked very sceptical, but the matter was dropped. A few days later, in the warm sunny weather, we both thought, that’s odd, those robbing bees do seem to be very purposeful. That’s when we discovered the haphazard arrangement of two bee boxes, discarded gods know how long ago, in the dark, ivy-infested jungle at the side of the house.
Clearing the undergrowth
We had bees. Again. Get the smoker out.
A late swarm like this is usually small, and doomed. But with our usual ineptitude, we hacked back the undergrowth and installed the colony in some sort of bee-order with a floor, varroa mesh (which we initially put on upside down, so had to dismantle and reassemble the whole structure), a opening restrictor to deter robbers (it was when we couldn’t get that in the entrance that we realised the varroa floor was upside down) and a roof. Still unsure how to tempt queen and colony from their wild comb into nice neat rectangular beekeepers’ wooden frames. Maybe we won’t. Gradually, a few inches at a time, we moved the bees forward out of the undergrowth so that they’re almost in the sun. Luckily, there’s been a lot of sun.
The thing about a bee suit is, it’s pointless unless everything’s tucked in
Now, at the start of October, they are still very active, feasting on late nectar flows from our Hemp Agrimony, Globe Thistles, Wild Bergamot, Sunflowers, Knapweeds and Michaelmas Daisies. Grudgingly, I note that the virulent ivy when it flowers will be just what they need before the winter. Who knows if they’ll come through the winter? These times are tough for our pollinators, tough for every species in fact. If they do, they’re going to the farm. Check for boxes in the undergrowth.
Small island of benign cattle, quartz-veined rock-pools, exotic trees and runaway rhododendrons: A chameleon island, shape-shifting as the weather pirouettes.
Truly Hebridean with its small, hand-moulded fields and slow pale meadows, and the flashes of white sand as the tide goes out.
But in a chiselled sky, it hardens to shoulder the wind-borne rains of Shetland. As sea-rocks darken and clouds come low, sand blackens. I taste metallic air of a sea-bound nation, far across a cold, uncompromising, northern sea.
Then, in a flash, a rainbow erupts: Sun-dazzled waves and sweet, warm, blackberry-festooned tracks through deep, lush valleys, recall Penwith, and sun-drowned, southern afternoons.
But this island holds its own keys; makes its own future; decides what to be and to be what it chooses.
As soon as I entered Taymount Wood, I smelt mushrooms. Across in the pattering shade of the woods to my left, a family was ducking and diving and exclaiming across the ditches to each other. I could glimpse baskets, a small dog, a child or two.
Great! I thought, people foraging. Good luck! With chanterelles from a previous forage in my fridge, I just wanted to walk without expectations or intent.
Looking for late summer flowers, I was taken by the large numbers of Wild Angelica growing either side of the path. Each geometrically arranged flowerhead hosted a happy horde of hoverflies and other pollinators. I’m 99.75% certain it is Wild Angelica, an edible plant – but I’ve never foraged it. The quarter of a percent of my brain that says “But wait, it might be Hemlock or one of the other poisonous members of the family out to deceive” prohibits me, despite the smell, season and appearance.
99.75% Wild Angelica
If in doubt, don’t. I no longer take risks with my foraging.
Taymount Wood is the wood that sidetracks me, every time. Up to the right, a sunlit glade. Cross the sleeper bridge to the left – what’s in here? Horse-hair mushrooms (Marasmius androsaceous) swarming up from the pine needles. A collection of puffballs (Lycoperdon perlatum) in mint condition cried out to be selectively foraged. Only firm, young ones are tasty, and leave more behind than you take.
Puffball (Lycoperdon perlatum)
One family of mushrooms of which you have to be wary is Amanita. There are some deadly poisonous members, some only moderately so. Others will send you psychotic. There’s a few edible ones. Taymount Wood today was full of Blushers (Amanita rubescens), one of the edible ones. I have never eaten it, and never will. The flesh bruises pink, which is the indicator of the species – but in other respects it is too like the deadly Panther Cap (A. pantherina). Just suppose a Panther Cap happened to blush one day….. In any case, Blushers are always riddled with worms and maggots before I get near them. Today, both species were growing close to each other and the difference was obvious. I still wouldn’t risk it.
In the photos below, a Blusher on the left, showing the ring; three stages of a Panther Cap; but what do you think is the one on the right? See what I mean?
The Tawny Grisette (A. fulva) I do eat. Unlike most of the family, there is no ring around the stipe, and the edges of the cap are evenly striated as if by a pastry-cook. They were here – but it’s a socially-distanced species that only ever appears singly – and I hate to take the only one.
Tawny Grisette
The stench of death – but not quite death – drew me to the well-named Stinkhorns (Phallus impudica) in the ditch. Most people recoil at eating this mushroom, which exudes a sticky gel smelling like a corpse to attract flies to spread the spores. But I’ve eaten plenty – at a very young stage when they look like eggs protruding from the forest floor. There’s no horrid smell and the jelly surrounding the immature fruiting body is actually delicious. All right, to each her own!
Stinkhorn
Sidetracked again, I met half the foraging family. Marcin, his young son (and the dog) had just found the biggest Boletus mushroom of the day. We chatted, compared notes, and I admired Marcin’s basket of Ceps, Bay Boletes and others. Marcin learned his mushroom lore from his mother and grandmother in Poland, and their preferences are the Boletus family, chanterelles and Saffron Milk Caps. He loves these woods, and values them for their beauty and food supply. The giant Bolete he said he will not pick, but leave it to spread spores and be admired.
I showed Marcin my collection of puffballs. He looked aghast. “You eat them??” Apparently not a favourite in Poland!
