The Morning After

unicorn mushrooms

The morning after the march I went mushrooming again. There were no mushrooms of any kind left in the fridge. I nearly didn’t bother, because I was dog tired, and, after all, I would pass at least three supermarkets in the afternoon.

But something about the air that morning was irresistible. Cool, zinging with the promise of sunshine; light, ethereal and just a little autumnal; dust motes and electrons dancing a jig. The dam and the woods and clearings energised and soothed simultaneously – an antidote to the adrenaline that had kept me up and awake till gone 2am, head birling with ideas and reflections and hope no anxiety could dampen.

Every secret hollow, bank and bog in my regular itinerary yielded something edible. Shaggy Inkcaps standing like soldiers, Hedgehog Mushrooms like tiny undercooked loaves, spiny as urchins beneath, chunky Orange Birch Boletes that go alarmingly black when you cut the flesh but taste divine. And a few late Saffron Milk Caps, only slightly infested.

jed Rohallion

The sunny gold of Chanterelles glistened like the yolk of a happy hen’s egg. Deer came skipping coquettishly out from the wood and crossed in front of me, one of them practically pirouetting in her glee – anticipating perhaps, the rutting season nearly upon us.

From my dog gazing lovingly at his stick floating away on the loch to the shafts of sudden sun on the ripples he makes, from the happy brown collie and his owner to the mute swans and their big grey babies – the morning after, all of Scotland seems to be smiling at me.

Mushroom-hunting, between Lowlands and Highlands

mushrooms1 A full evening, two nights and two days of rain. Humidity hangs in the air, the soil beneath my feet pulses damply, the mosses are full and green. Raindrops still coat every flower of grass and frond of bracken, but the sun is shining. The timing is right.

I go for mushrooms in the place where the Highlands meet the Lowlands, where the land is rent by fault-lines and rainbow-coloured slate out-crops and erupts. I pass the court hill where outlaws were tried and hung from the oak trees of Birnam Wood, three hundred years after Macbeth was king of this nation. I stalk through the devastation where the larches were, before they got phytophthera and were felled. There is nothing there now. But in the crowded wood beside the path, one big larch has been missed, and the sun shines in tawny patches upon last year’s fallen needles. It catches on a small group of Larch Boletes, glistening and tawny themselves in their cosy cohabitation with the tree. I take one. A deadly Panther Cap smirks nearby and I ignore it.

Broken and battered, an old sweet chestnut tree is mushrooms3 surviving the metallic blundering of the foresters’ vehicles, harvesters and forwarders, along the track. How did it get here? Not a native tree, so planted a long time ago, when this haphazard forest was occupied in a different way. Who planted it? Did they hope for chestnuts to roast on autumn fires?

I follow the hint of a track down a slope towards the thicket where rhododendron is making its usual bid for world domination. No more than a wisp of trodden grass and bent fern, my path diverges and peters out at a crop of the biggest chanterelles I’ve mushrooms2 ever seen, tucked into the side of a rugged bank that oozes water. Was this path made by a human who knew where to look, or by another animal? Someone told me yesterday that the best chanterelles are on banks and slopes because the deer can’t graze them there.

I’m always competing with other animals for my dinner. But I’ve had lots of chanterelles this summer and there is still a dish at home in the fridge. I take a couple. I have rules when I’m foraging. Never take more than I need, only take a percentage of whatever I find, leave old mushrooms to sporulate, leave young ones for tomorrow, for the next predator or none, for others just to see and love.

Under birch, I acquire some young Brown Birch Boletes and a single Cep. Ploughing through forest, I note the tiny horsehair mushrooms are up and about, trooping on twigs and the needles of conifers. I ignore, too, the many “wee brown jobs” of mushrooms that once I diligently took home as single specimens to try to identify with hand lens and spore print. Some I succeeded in pinning down, too, only to forget them altogether until I came across them again in another wood, another year. Life’s too short now, I am focused on my prey. mushrooms4

Huge shaggy mushrooms shout out to me as I pass another grove of conifers and I am lured in. But they are the uneaten halves of massive fir cones – red squirrels have eaten the succulent tops from every one, and laugh at me from the tree tops.

They cluster in the fallen forest by the dam, the new flush of Saffron Milk Caps, just where I thought they’d be, and just at the right stage before the fungus gnats lay their eggs. They are sound, and plentiful and could make a wonderful painting, with their improbable colours of orange, cream and khaki-green. But they won’t, for I take my portion and weave them into a spell of dinner.

mushrooms 5

Before the Chanterelles

In the misty dampness of a cool May morning, the tangled and decaying woodland holds its breath. Falling trees prop up shattered branches and each other, precariously leaning, hanging on by brittle twigs to some semblance of the vertical. Elsewhere, the long archaeology of those that have already succumbed to gravity make the woodland floor uneven, precarious, unpredictable. Some are half-sunken: indistinct mounds of mosses and soft, cushion-like wood, sprouting ferns and small plants – wood sorrel, purslane, chickweed wintergreen – from every crevice. Others, newly crashed in last week’s gale, still carry their leaves, shrivelling, poignant. Between the two extremes, lie trees and logs in every stage of decomposition.

The walker in this wood must learn these stages, and recognise which logs will still make good rafts to lay across the boggy places and ditches she would cross, and which will just crumble when stepped on. She must be aware of what lies overhead and if it would be wiser to go around, rather than under, the hung-up branches. Familiar paths are blocked every month and must be re-routed. New ground is created, explored, and lost again.

Out of the decomposition, new worlds are also born. What is decomposition if not the beginning of opportunity? Spiders re-align their webs in the remaining dead branches of a leaning tree. The breakdown of bark releases nutrients; tree becomes soil, soil claims tree. Single-celled organisms work their way through a sea of bacteria, laying the foundation for others to thrive.

Opportunities are made for beetles that feast on the rot in wood and bark, and the birds and small mammals that home in on the beetles. Shelter, food source, songpost, tunnel, bridge – the creatures of the wood utilise the fallen and falling trees in many ways. On their bodies they bring more soil, seeds, and the elements of fertility to this garden of decay.

And oh, how the garden grows.

It is not death that the walker witnesses, but birth and life. Is this decomposition, or composition? Is it both? Is this the end of the wood, or the beginning of a new landscape? No human cares much for this wood. Children sometimes come and make fires, camp or build twiggy shelters, but you never see them. There is an old tyre swing, hanging neglected. Someone – no-one knew who – used to make sculptures out of stones in the heart of the wood, but not anymore. Dogs are walked, but usually led straight past the wood now that access is trickier. No-one “manages” it. Change, then, seems rapid. Whole trees crash down, leaving soggy craters and towering cliffs of root-ball, but transformation in nature is incremental, and constant. Each year, the populations dwelling on those bare root-cliffs are slightly different. Ground living fungi give way to aerial brackets, rabbits exploit entrances to potential burrows, liverworts, lichens and ferns take hold.

And underground, fungal mycelia move like whispers within subtle, shape-shifting parameters. Today, a downpour of the night is percolating under the moss-covered banks and logs. Soft spring rain, scarcely visible except when the smirr catches a shard of sunshine, seeps into the soil cauldron, fermenting, bringing new elements, new conditions.

Things move unseen.

Everything waits.

The walker in the woods has seen no mushrooms yet. But even a human animal can smell the contents of the cauldron, the warm, damp changes happening unseen below the wreckage of an unmarked wood. When all the boxes have been ticked, the harvest will be rich and golden.