Country diary: magical mushrooms spark the children’s imagination
Before I retired from university teaching, I brought undergraduates to this valley at the bottom of the botanic garden to demonstrate the rudiments of mycology. It’s a perfect location for a fungal foray: deciduous beech and oak woodland on one side of a small stream, a conifer plantation on the other, with plentiful fallen timber.
The site is managed for mycological diversity, allowing dead branches to decay where they fall, entering an afterlife where wave after wave of fungal hyphae slowly reduce them to humus. As that great woodsman Oliver Rackham once said: “A horizontal tree – alive or dead – is at least as good a habitat as an upright one.”
Today my students were my granddaughters, aged two and four, who raced under the newly installed entrance archway formed from 10-foottall toadstool sculptures, made by local artist-blacksmith Graeme Hopper and financed by the Friends of the Garden. With their elegant picturebook simplicity, the giant metal fungi are a perfect gateway to the magical world of mushrooms and an open invitation to storytelling.
The imagination of small children knows no limits. We agreed that tall, grey-capped toadstools were dinner tables for the forest folk, and that puffballs that sent up smoky eruptions of spores when they tapped them with a stick must be chimneys of their hidden underground homes.
When we discovered stumps covered with grey and black threads that resembled extinguished candlewicks, the children’s instant question was: “Can we come back at night and see these candles burning?” That image that they gifted, of a nocturnal woodland floor flickering with tiny lights, will come to mind now whenever I find this common candlesnuff fungus(Xylaria hypoxylon).
In years to come, perhaps they too will become undergraduates, pondering the mystery of how minute white threads, finer than human hair, that we discovered under a rotting log, organise themselves into the elegant architecture of toadstools we found today. For, surely, curiosity begins with the joy of discovery, which triggers the need for an explanation and leads to an endless journey to find better answers. Along the way, it’s good to listen to the innocent imagination of a child, to recall where it all begins.