Country diary: up to the gills in toadstool spores
There is something stealthy about toadstools. When we followed this path recently there were none. Today a dozen shaggy parasols (Chlorophyllum rhacodes) had appeared, shouldering aside the soil with their closed caps. One of these toadstools,with a newly expanded scaly canopy perched on its long frilled stalk, was at the perfect stage for preparing a spore print.
Back home I cut off its stalk and that of a fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), taking care not to damage the fragile, pure white, gills radiating from their centres.
I placed each, gill-side down, on sheets of dark paper on the dining table, under a plastic box to shield them from draughts, then closed the door and went to bed.
In the morning the results were good: a sharp print of the gill pattern, where uncountable numbers of spores, each around one hundredth of a millimetre in diameter, had drifted down between the gills and piled up on the paper surface.
Not perfect, they never are. There is always some smudging or gaps or meandering trails of small insects that have crawled across the pattern created by the spore snowstorm.
There is a practical purpose in preparing a spore print. Often its colour is of critical importance in identifying the species. But there is aesthetic delight too, tinged with a little regret that the prints are so hard to preserve. The slightest touch blurs their sharp lines. And artist’s varnish dulls them.
“Our kind multiplies/ we shall by morning/ inherit the earth/ our foot’s in the door,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her poem Mushrooms. And multiply they do, in vast numbers, in their blizzards of wind-blown spores, invisible unless revealed with a microscope or by their accumulated pattern on paper.
When spores germinate they form a network of ever-expanding hyphae, threads finer than a human hair, relentlessly digesting organic matter in their path. When fully fed, how do they organise and weave themselves together, erupting into the daylight as toadstools with such elegant and varied architectural forms? It is one of nature’s abiding mysteries.
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