Mushroom season is definitely here.

Such a strange colour: surely Chlorociboria. You can read about it on Tom Volk's pages.  It stains the wood green - this was used for designs in 17th century inlaid boxes (Tunbridge Ware).

I went for a nice walk with my sister in Lower Woods this weekend. It's a lovely ancient woodland owned by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. You'll probably get a trip out there on your course at some point. We were idiotically intending to go to Westonbirt (the national tree zoo nearby) but I freaked out at the vast numbers of people flocking towards it (very slowly, the jams went back miles). It was like trying to get into some massive festival. No-one much was at Lower Woods though. I felt calm again.

I don't know what these lovely peachy furry brackets are yet.

I thought you might like to see a few of the things we saw. We stuck to the paths and were only looking at Things On Logs so I imagine there'd be many more traditionally mushroom-shaped species about. But we mostly saw the freaky things on decaying wood.

Maybe Ascocoryne sarcoides. (Some convincing likenesses at First Nature.)

So if you find anything interesting, please do bring it in to be frozen, and I will pop it in the queue for the freeze drier. I've already done some mushrooms for several students and it seems to be working well.

Dave found some Hedgehog fungi on a walk at the weekend. Imagine the excitement. They have spines instead of gills. Whatever next.

Hypnum repandum, Hedgehog fungus. Image D J Kelly.

And speaking of strange things,  I also found this, which turns out to be not a fungus at all, but a slime mould, namely Lycogala epidendrum. It was squishy to the touch. I do have a habit of investigating the relatively squishiness of all the peculiar mushroomy things I find. It's helpful with identification (and if you get unsuspecting accompanying friends to try too, you get a range of squealing noises).

These are very strange things. There are some more species on the First Nature website. Apparently some can solve mazes. I'm not kidding. Read more at the UBC Botanical Garden.

I'm supposed to be packing the field trip. But all this is a rabbit hole of interesting and distracting weirdness.

A quick fungi link: you can read all about Kew Gardens' "Fungarium" here.

30.10 Another mushroom update: I can't help myself so have bought a new book. It's by Peter Marren.  Its beautifully designed cover didn't help stop the money flying out of my account. It's supposed to be very engagingly written, and I hope it will fill me with interesting information to trot out to fellow mushroom hunters on field trips. I also read a very interesting article by him on A New Nature Blog in which he refutes the Forestry Commission's idea that picking fungi is Bad (for the fungi, that is).