Killer orange fungus comes with a curse
THE barren canvas of the country- side in winter, when the trees are bare and the fields devoid of flowers, makes colour stand out all the more.
Vivid red berries designed to catch the eye of passing birds, who eat their fill and spread the pips, add pointillist dots of brightness in the hedgerows, but scenery can be fairly monotone at this time of year, especially after the snow that fell yesterday.
So I was stopped in my tracks by an intense blob of orangey-yellow on a dead bit of gorse bush, as if a passing artist had squirted the contents of a tube of acrylic paint onto the bark.
Closer inspection revealed it was a fungus of some kind, but I’m no expert mycologist so I took a photo and attempted to identify it when I returned home.
It turns out, unless I’m mistaken, to be a species with the grisly name ‘yellow brain fungus’. And, bizarrely, this is a fungus that eats... fungus.
According to the Woodland Trust this gelatinous blob is a parasitic jelly fungus, that resembles a brain and feeds on wood-rotting fungus of the Peniophora genus, such as the rosy crust fungus that breaks down dead wood.
It looks fairly slimy when wet, and I didn’t touch it, but can harden as it dries out, and ranges in colour from pale yellow to bright orange.
Yellow brain fungus, also known as golden jelly fungus, can be spotted on dead deciduous wood and notably gorse, particularly in winter.
Such a strange-looking mass is simply asking to have some mythological curse or other attached to it, and indeed it is also known as ‘witches’ butter’. Always those pesky witches at work!
According to legend, if the fungus appeared on the gate or door of a house it meant that a witch had cast a spell on the family living there. The only way the spell could be removed was by piercing the fungus several times with straight pins until it went away.
A striking and fascinating species, with sinister symbolism and mould killing tendencies. Truly – with apologies to the children’s author Raymond Briggs – a fungus bogeyman.