The Countryside Code Fungal Appendix

If you are out in the countryside and find a mushroom you think is poisonous, do not panic and trample or kick it to ****. It cannot kill you unless you eat it. It doesn’t even want to kill you and it cannot chase after you either. It is a beautiful organism trying to reproduce itself. Leave it alone. (Oh – and do not eat it) (Photo above is an example – isn’t it lovely!)
If you find a mushroom and you don’t know what it is or if you can eat it or not, see 1. The same applies. If you want to identify it, take a photo and maybe one specimen.
If you find a mushroom, that you 100% know you can eat and you want to, pick – but adhere to these sub-directives:
* Don’t pick the whole blooming lot – never more than your personal needs
That includes large mushrooms like Chicken of the Woods growing on trees – never take it all
* Always leave plenty of young and old (reproducing) specimens behind
* If there’s only one or very few, leave them for others to enjoy, including other fungus-eating species such as deer
* Keep your big feet from trampling the site and all the ecosystem it holds to bits. Tread lightly and avoid damaging vegetation
* If you carry an open-weave basket, your dinner will arrive home in better shape and may even shed some spores along the way
With particular reference to Giant Puffballs: these are not footballs – they are not spherical. Nor are they rugby balls, golf balls, cricket balls or any other species of ball. Therefore, do not treat them as one. If you would like to eat one, pick it carefully, take it home, and share it with like-minded friends before cooking it. This is because if you try to eat a full-sized Giant Puffball on your own, you will be feeling nauseous by day three. They are way too big for one forager.
If you have children, take them foraging and teach them why fungi are so important to life on earth. Let them learn what’s safe to pick and what to leave alone as you do. Introduce them to this appendix to the Countryside Code.

(If you don’t know yet why fungi are so important, Entangled Life by Merlyn Sheldrake is a good read.)

In Search of….anything but asparagus….

*What I aspire to! Grown by J. Neill & Sons*

In Catalonia, we stalked shifty looking men in the woods, all clearly trying to avoid being followed, saw them emerging later from the scrub carrying scrawny, dangling wisps of green. The Wild Asparagus. Allegedly, the acme of a forager’s progress. And no-one was about to help us find it.

So, grow your own, I decide. The very first raised bed with which I replaced nursery benches as I journeyed towards retirement three years ago, I planted up with two-year old purple asparagus crowns. They said, you need to be patient to grow asparagus, but it will be worth waiting for. I have waited. I have ladled seaweed, imported from Fife and Angus beaches, over the bed twice a year. I have weeded more meticulously than is my habit, because the asparagus gurus say asparagus cannot tolerate weeds. I have fed the largely invisible plants. Now, it is May again, and still there’s nothing much to see here.

But there are alternatives. In spring the emerging spears of Solomon’s Seal, an enthusiastic wild member of the same family – Liliaceae – provide a luscious alternative; slightly more bitter but I’d argue all the better for that. No chewy tough bases to the spears, either. Their season is but a fortnight, and does not satisfy.

And REAL asparagus, they tell me, is better…. I do not believe them.

I WILL have shoots and spears in spring. I go to the clearing in the hazel copse, where annually the willow herb heaves itself through soil and its own winter debris, in the form of thickish shoots and red-brown, furled leaves. I pick the fattest and youngest and steam them, then sizzle in butter, Now these ARE bitter….and some are like toothpicks. I eat a plateful anyway.

Back to the garden, where five out of the original twelve asparagus crowns are showing single, unenthusiastic, skinny purple spears. I think, how many new potatoes could I be getting out of that bed? How much chard or broccoli or succulent fennel? A friend donates some asparagus seed, originally collected in Italy but bred in Perthshire over twenty years, to our seed library and puts pictures on Facebook of fists-full of fat, early spears in April. I sow the seed, to back up my shy and retiring crowns, who are now five years old. I discover that my friend’s grows itself, without fuss, in a polytunnel. So shall mine do.

Hop shoots call to me. Vigorous, ornamental, golden hops and the fatter, darker, beery ones, seething with alcoholic promise. All are edible and they taste great. They’re in the nettle family, and, like nettles, the more you pick the shoots, the more shoots come. I find that hops and nettles combined appeases me greatly.

*Hop shoots – Golden, Challenger & Fuggles, all good*

Then up come the hostas. Fleshy, delicious, plumper than any asparagus but shorter too. I cut them before the leaves unfurl, but it’s not crucial: the leaves of this delectable Japanese vegetable are also very tasty and should never be consigned to a flower border. Although the flowers, when they come, are bonnie to look at as well. I remember that hostas are also in the lily family. They aren’t asparagus, but they’re close; and they’re easy to grow, reliable and pretty too.

After a moment’s thought, I cut two of the pathetic asparagus spears and add them to a dish of hosta. We get one spear each, but plenty of hosta shoots.

(Today I found someone is growing asparagus locally, commercially. It’s abundant, large and not too expensive. I’ve decided, if this year doesn’t reward my patience, that bed is going to be hostas next summer. And maybe the new seedlings in the polytunnel will one day give me payback!)

What we Choose to Eat from the Woods

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

This post was written for West Stormont Woodland Group https://www.weststormontwoodlandgroup.org.uk/

The Mushroom at the End of the Wood

A Post for West Stormont Woodland Group

In Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World*, she tells the story of landscapes ruined – or seemingly ruined – by the greed of human activity. In particular, forests. In one unpromising forest in Oregon USA, where commercial forestry had stripped out all the trees of value and left an empty terrain of broken ground and scrubby volunteer pines, she met some mushroom hunters, refugees from Laos. They were gathering Matsutake, one of the most prized and valuable edible mushrooms in Japan and – allegedly – the first living organisms to appear from the wreckage of Hiroshima after the Bomb.

Matsutake mushrooms, like many fungi, only appear when they can be entangled with the roots of a suitable host tree in a mycorrhizal relationship. They got on very well with those scrubby pines. Tsing tells how the accidental introduction of the Pine Wilt Nematode on a shipment of American Pine into Japan had devastated the Matsutake’s natural host there, hence its rarity. It is not a serious pest of American Pine.

Incidentally, Scots Pine is a good host for Matsutake, too….

Abandoned remnants of the commercial forest

Mushrooms disappearing when a forest changes is familiar to me. All forests and woods are in the process of change, but our two ex-commercial forests, Five Mile and Taymount Woods, are forests in abrupt transition. Before the Commission took out the last valuable trees and wind-throw did for many more, Five Mile Wood was my happy mushroom-hunting ground, the place I’d take people to for foraging walks. I knew exactly where to find the biggest chanterelles, the white Angels’ Wings, the logs where real oyster mushrooms could often break out. The ditches beside the path were home to many fascinating species, including several edible Boletus including the Cep and the maggot-free Bay Bolete – and, of course plenty of highly poisonous examples too. Some years, the tantalisingly similar but inedible False Chanterelle outnumbered the real one – which is exactly what you need when teaching people not to harm themselves by misidentification. One damp corner was an emporium for the delicious Slippery Jack, which turned up in troops like clockwork, every year in late summer and autumn. I used to dry the ones we didn’t fry up right away, and store them in jars.

The fragile associations which had built up over the decades were shattered by felling. The self-sown birches that are colonising parts of both the woods now will eventually reel in their own, interconnected fungal friends, and the chanterelles will surely re-emerge one day, because birch is their main host tree. But from my experience, it takes at least a decade before mushrooms start to appear in a new wood, and the first arrivals are never the ones you want to eat! The precarity of a habitat for specific mushrooms is alarming – involving water tables, shade, parasitic plants, weather patterns, nematodes, beetles, animals – including mushroom pickers. Tsing’s book includes chapters on the equally precarious lives of the pickers – refugees, indigenous peoples, itinerants. Humans aren’t in control of what the mushrooms will do, because there are so many variables in play. Humans are just part of the landscape, and the landscape is changing because of and despite them.

So, I can only observe and enjoy the new but mushroom-free habitats in parts of our woods, note the changes, watch new worlds forming out of devastation and realise we are not in charge, not that clever, and maybe, not that important either. I scoured the ditches in Five Mile Wood for boletes recently, and right at the end, I did find a couple of lingering and determined specimens. I left them there.

But who knows what will be the mushroom at the end of the wood? And where is the end of the wood?

*Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt: The Mushroom at the End of the World – On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princetown University Press 2015)

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

Feral Berries

These fields, which now yawn under the predictable rotation of wheat, barley, potatoes and the occasion excitement of peas or beans, were all berry fields once. It was the biggest and best-known of five plantations around here, where canvas tinker villages sprouted annually at harvest time, and the needs of the workforce were met in this now silent, gone-to-work, wee town by a wealth of grocers, bakers, butchers, innkeepers, tailors and shoemakers. At least five surgeons lived here in case of accident or emergency. The berries that weren’t eaten on the spot or smuggled home by the pickers all went south, on the new branch line connected to the village for the purpose, to become jam on well-to-do breakfast tables.

Now in the quiet forgetfulness of displaced industry and commuter inertia, tangled woods wrap themselves round the margins of large exposed fields. The old track takes you past the farmhouse that is no longer a farm, the steading that is no longer a steading, and wanders aimlessly north, between the remnants of its hedgerows. Long ago, it was the only road north, save for an older track across the moss.

Here and there, a narrow change in fencing or a wooden post marks where one of the many footpaths to and from the berry fields used to run. A curious right of way plummets through someone’s back garden and still has legal status. Patches of No Man’s Land persist, and where they do, the ghosts of the berry fields haunt and echo.

feral berries 1 In the dense shade of a triumphant elder spinney, a smattering of redcurrant bushes blooms and fruits, scant rich redness catching the eye as the berries ripen. They are small and sour, yet somehow incandescently flavoursome. Where the track narrows to a muddy path, wild gooseberries make a wee thicket. Their fruits are also tiny, and round. Are they genuinely wild?

Or the depleted progeny of an old cultivar, maybe Scottish Chieftain or Lord Elcho, prized a century ago, now nearly forgotten?

But the raspberries, they are everywhere; an abundance that makes cultivation seem a frivolous and needless expenditure of time. They spring from lawns and borders in untidy local gardens, in numbers that cannot be put down to the activities of a large and hungry population of blackbirds. They line the hedges that border the track, they rise lushly above the willow herb and tall grasses of woodland clearings. They are bountiful enough to gather for the freezer, but, more often, they make a wayside breakfast for people out with their dogs on sunny summer mornings, staring vacantly into the trees, popping raspberries like pills.

In one small hedge remnant, the raspberries go unseen and untried by strangers. These IMG_20190727_093257760 diminutive rasps are a pale golden yellow. They hide behind fiercely protective stands of nettle, and amid the jaggy stems of the hawthorn. These are the sweetest, most succulent of the feral berries. They melt in the mouth and almost dissolve in the hand. Any attempts to gather a large quantity fail; they are nought but juice by the time they get home. Those who know about them keep a close eye, and say nothing, then give the game away when it’s picking time by beating narrow paths through the grass and nettles to get at this choice fruit.

All in the past now, the Auchtergaven and Bankfoot berry fields. The history of a place often speaks through its plants, and may have something to say about its present..