Southland
Robert Guyton hunts for mushrooms.
Easily-recognised and familiar-tasting meadow mushrooms, pillow-like birch boletes that grow under the tree whose name they borrow, plump porcini (the king of the boletes and eagerly sought after by anyone who’s ever tasted one), shaggy parasols, shaggy inkcaps, peppery boletes – all lovely and safe to eat… once you’re assured they are what you think they are, of course.
I have found mushrooms growing in the most surprising places.
From the sawdust bed I’d made to stand my potted-up baby trees on to overwinter, there erupted an elegant, never-beforeseen tall, ivory-skinned beauty I learned was named stubble rosegill.
It is often found growing in fields of stubble left after the harvester or scythe had been through. How the rosegill came to be in my garden – where grains are not grown – is a delightful mystery!
Not far from that spot popped up a far less appealing mushroom: from beneath the old ‘Robert Peel’ rhododendron, the leathery cap of a Pluteus emerged, looking for all the world like a lump of horse manure – not the sort of mushroom you’d photograph and hang on the wall, perhaps, but as I studied it, I began to notice its good features. Staunch and robust, it didn’t melt to black ink overnight the way the inkcap family does, and it made an attractive spore print; sitting the cap on a clean sheet of paper for a few hours produces a fine and often beautiful print from which a more accurate description can be made.
I’ve done dozens this season and fixed them to the paper by spraying them with artists’ fixative. My collection features many colours and sizes of mushrooms large and small, and will go up on the wall once winter’s over and my set is complete.
Most people are familiar with the red and white poisonous toadstools that grow beneath pine trees. Amanita muscaria grew prolifically across the country this autumn, according to reports and photos that came in to the mushroom fanatics’ websites over the long, damp season.
I joined in, having captured some gorgeous images of the fairy-tale mushrooms, even making some paper mache models to try to “capture” them in a permanent way.
Mushrooms are difficult to store.
Freezing turns them to mush and drying them out renders them so wrinkled and shrunken, they barely resemble their fresh selves.
I’d brought home some Amanitas years ago, and scattered the softening caps under the spreading branches of the big silver birch beside the house. They took up residence, so now I can look out my lounge window in autumn and see them where they’ve emerged from the leaf mulch and spread their cheerful spotted caps.
Their edible big brother, the handsome lawyer’s wig, makes a good meal if you pick them when they’re creamy-white all through, but leave them lying on the bench overnight and you’ll be able to write your name with the resulting ink, but not eat them, no matter how hungry you might be feeling!
If you don’t have these growing in your own lawn, it doesn’t take long to find someone’s that does feature them. It may be possible to get them going at home by tucking some caps into the turf or even collecting spores, mixing them with water and getting them through the catch that way, but don’t count on being successful with your first attempt – some fungi are fussy about where they’ll live.
The most important thing a gardener can do to encourage mushrooms of all sorts to take up residence is to not cultivate.
Digging and hoeing take the chance of mushroom settlement down to zero. Don’t spray with anything at all fungicidal, herbicidal or pesticidal. Lastly, leave fallen twigs and branches, whole or chipped, lying beneath the trees they were pruned from.
Many fungi love lignin, the main ingredient in woody stuff, and will happily move in and spread their mycelium networks throughout what will be, to them, a meal and a home.
A season so rich in mushrooms as the one that’s just finishing now may never come again, but who knows? If we prepare our gardens, parks and street-sides in a fungi-friendly manner, there might be more of them to pick, eat, photograph and marvel over. I certainly hope so. ✤
These cooler, wetter months have been extraordinary for gardeners who like mushrooms, and it's been a boom season, the mushroom hunters declare.