A new fairy ring, Norwood Grove

Found a new fairy ring in Norwood Grove today, of very mature Shaggy Parasols (possibly Parasols, Macrolepiota procera?), growing around a Holly tree. The stipes (stems) look more speckled, hence my uncertainty, they are really large too. However there was a reddish bruising when the gills were touched, so more likely to be Shaggy Parasols? I was careful to apologise to the fairies as I photographed the ring. The caps have inverted on all the larger ones, like umbrellas in a high wind. The ring looked like it might extend into the grounds of the White House, it had an ancient, secretive feel about it. The fungi are very well hidden so have been able to grow to maturity.

Another Shaggy Inkcap, same field as the one I saw earlier this week. Edible when young.

Nice view of the double layered ring on a shaggy parasol and gills.

Below, Field Mushrooms, Agaricus campestris? Nice brown gills, 

Below, Common Bonnet I think, Mycena Galericulata, with smooth, tough stems.

These, below, looked pretty horrid, rather slimy. They might be Honey Fungus, Armillaria mellea, again, same field, their yellowness doesn't come across in the photo. 

"Although these fungi can become a serious disease for gardeners, without them the Earth would probably be covered in dead trees. As a wood-decaying fungus it breaks down dead trees returning nutrients to the soil."  (Fairweathers)

Fairy Rings:cylch y Tylwyth Teg

"Legends  warn you that those who join the Fairy  dance within the circle under the moon  are sometimes lost to time and place" (Peggy Jentoft)

This afternoon I found the remains of  two impressive fairy rings, or, rather arcs, of partial fairy rings, in Sydenham Hill woods. Finding and entering such rings means I am now in thrall to elves and fairies, and, according to Welsh folklore, may be required to dance myself to death with the fairies at some point in the future, this seems like a small price to pay for encountering such a natural marvel. One of the rings was formed by large Shaggy Parasols, (see the image below), I'd guess it was at least 7 foot wide. The Shaggy Parasols were the biggest I've seen, some as wide as my hands. Apparently such rings can be very ancient, some on the South Downs are reputedly 700 years old. Certain theories propose that the rings get larger every year.

Above, the arc of a very large Shaggy Parasol partial Fairy Ring, in Welsh: cylch y Tylwyth Teg, the Tylwyth Teg are the Welsh fair family or fairy people.

I think the other ring was formed by Oyster Mushrooms, Pleurotus (see the photos below) this ring was smaller, curling around a small maple tree. I think the gills are too fine for a  Fairy Ring Champignon  AKA Scotch Bonnet, Marasmius oreades, the colour is also wrong, and the caps are too big.  If they are Oyster Mushrooms they are eminently edible. But I'm not at all confident exactly what they are.

Below, some of the fantastic Shaggy Parasols I saw in Sydenham Hill Woods today:

I found this scene below, slightly disturbing, the little shrooms were growing inside the cobwebby trunk of a felled tree, imprisoned by a spider?

Below, this is a Shaggy Ink Cap, Coprinus comatus, lawyer's wig, or shaggy mane,  I saw in Norwood Grove yesterday, one of the few fungi I've seen that fits its text book description perfectly! It even left my hands stained with a deep black liquid, the spore filled deliquescent (liquid solution) that gives this fungi its inky name. Apparently they are edible and tasty when young.

Altered tree states?The Global Forest: 40 ways trees can save us by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

The Global Forest: 40 ways trees can save us by Diana Beresford-Kroeger 

Reading this book is like entering into a kind of altered state, which is entirely in keeping with my own experience of entering woods and forests.  The book comprises forty very short sections, these read as what she calls 'refrains' : appetisers, provocations, wisdoms. The author is a respected tree expert, albeit a renegade one, so perhaps we can take some of the more outlandish assertions on trust, or suspend judgement in the context of a book which is self-declaredly part science but also part poetry, part 'spiritual' exposition.

I never really know what the word 'spiritual' means beyond platitudes, but an encounter with trees and the 'natural' environment, must be close to the intended meaning , if it really means anything at all. 

Some things in this book are mystifying, for example the assertion that black and green walnuts can respectively protect against diabetes and childhood leukemia. Merely by holding them humans can be healed via some form of biochemical transfer. I'd like to understand what this means, but there isn't time for more detail, perhaps the book really should be read as a kind of research appetiser?

The author, Diana Beresford-Kroeger has also been involved in the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, in which cuttings are taken from 'Grandmother trees', our regal elders, some of whom are 4000 years old. The future of our beautiful trees is constantly threatened by pollution and land grabbing. This is vital work, confirmed by such horrible things as the story I  read recently about the 400 year old Oaken Wood in Kent. The government has given a company called Gallagher Aggregates permission to destroy this woodland in order to build a quarry. Government ministers should read this book and begin to understand the wider implications of destroying our arboreal heritage.

Link to news story about Oaken wood: 
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/22/oaken-wood-kent-uprooted-quarry

Scalycap or honeyfungus, Armillaria mellea?

I saw this bunch of fungi in Norwood Grove on Friday, at first I thought it could be the Scalycap, Pholiota squarrosoides, though it is more of a North American Fungi, failing that an atypical example of the Shaggy Scalycap, Pholiota squarrosa. The image doesn't do its sulphur yellowness justice, but it is both a sulphury yellow and has triangular shaped scales as befits the textbook description,  it also has pale gills and no distinct odour. First-nature.com describes it as:

"yellow-ochre or straw-yellow; covered in upturned triangular brown scales in more or less concentric rings.Convex at first, the caps flatten with age but retain an in-rolled margin.
The cap flesh is very pale yellow, and it is quite firm."

Some sources say it's easily confused with the bioluminescent (meaning it has gills that glow in the dark!) honeyfungus,  Armillaria mellea, which is admittedly much more common, but these ones don't have markedly dark rings at the centre of the cap, though they may be emerging. Maybe I should go back at night to see if they glow? Apparently they are bad news for the surrounding eco-system, so I hope they are not Honeyfungi. I guess they are more likely to be honeyfungus though.

Having read up on the Shaggy Parasol at length last week, and also noting the red-brown bruising on the batch depicted below, I took the foolish step of frying one in butter and eating it with couscous. It had fallen over so I wasn't breaking my rule of not picking them. But after I ate it (it was tasty but a bit on the gritty side) I then looked on-line and realised in North America, at least, there is a poisonous look-alike. I thought about making myself vomit just in case, but then decided the chances were slim of finding one in the UK, but I wont do that again, not while I know so little. Even the spore tests can be inconclusive for this one, so not worth chancing 6 or so hours of vomiting blood for a fried mushroom!

" young shaggy parasols look identical to the poisonous Chlorophyllum molybdites (the mushroom that causes the most poisonings in North America yearly)."

Lots of fungi in the woods this morning

There were lots of interesting fungi in Sydenham Hill Woods this morning, as well as many Long tailed-tits, Aegithalos caudatus, described by the RSPB as :

"easily recognisable with its distinctive colouring, a tail that is bigger than its body, and undulating flight. Gregarious and noisy residents, long-tailed tits are most usually noticed in small, excitable flocks of about 20 birds. Like most tits, they rove the woods and hedgerows, but are also seen on heaths and commons with suitable bushes"

These ones certainly fit the description of noisy and gregarious, I saw them very close up, enough to appreciate how cute they are. Not my image below,  but this is exactly what they looked like, almost fluffy like chicks:

 Long-tailed tit, from http://songbirds-slaughter.org.uk/

I also saw a Coal Tit, Periparus ater, I was looking for the Goldcrest  (oops, or was it Firecrest?)  pair we were told have been seen in the woods recently, but no luck, these are clearly very discreet birds. I saw a very russety red headed critter which could have been a tree sparrow but I am told they are rare now, so maybe not, but I can't see anything similar in my book. I also saw what I think was a wren (pale grey) and more nuthatches, I think there are lots of Redwing around but would need to check with people who really know their stuff. I also saw beautiful Blue Tits, green parakeets (they are everywhere in South London), Jays and very fat Wood Pigeons.

There were fungi galore, the image below, I think might be Common Bonnet, Mycena galericulata, or Mycena inclinata, because of the tooth-edged caps,  failing that glistening inkcap, Coprinellus micaceus? Though the shape isn't really right. I think Common Bonnet, though I dont know what 'meal' smells like, their suppossed smell,  these just smell 'mushroomy',  maybe I need to develop more skill in distinguishing the subtle olfactory features of fungi?





Below, LOTS of this in the wood today, Orange peel fungus? Jelly Rot? It didn't feel the same as the jelly ear we looked at on the walk last week,it  seemed drier and much more orange, Jelly ear fungus is more pink, flesh coloured. Chicken of the Wood would be exciting, but it isn't really clustered together that densely, I think it's  Jelly Rot Fungus, Merulius tremellosus, the colour range seems to go from white to orange, it seems too rough for Orange Peel fungus.

Above, has a much squarer nipple shape, but I guess it could still be a Mycena of some sort, some pictures on-line do have the same nipple which is not present in the other ones I mention in this blog. Identification of LBJs (little brown jobs)  is a challenge...

Shaggy Parasol day 2

Above, you can clearly see the double layered ring on the stem of this young Shaggy Parasol

 The Shaggy Parasol, Chlorophyllum rhacodes, in Norwood Grove, although still not fully grown,  looks even closer to its textbook description today:
"The "Shaggy Parasol" is an impressive mushroom, characterized by its large size, its shaggy and scaly cap", with "thick brown scales and protuberances on its fleshy white cap. The gills and spore print are both white in colour. Its stipe is slender, but bulbous at the base, is coloured uniformly and bears no patterns. It is fleshy, and a reddish, or maroon discoloration occurs and a pungent odour is evolved when it is cut. The egg-shaped caps become wider and flatter as they mature."

Shaggy parasols are agaric, which doesn't mean they are scary and will make you go Viking berserk if you eat them, the term describes a "saprotrophic basidiomycetous fungus of the family Agaricaceae, having gills on the underside of the cap."  Saprotrophic means living on dead matter.

Basidiomycetes include "mushrooms, puffballs, stinkhorns, bracket fungi, other polypores, jelly fungi, boletes, chanterelles, earth stars, smuts, bunts, rusts, mirror yeasts" and, quite scarily, "the human pathogenic yeast Cryptococcus". 

I love all of Ernst Haeckel's nature drawings, including his 1904 image of Basidiomycetes, below:

Today's Shaggy Parasol didn't smell particularly sweet as one fungi book said it would, but it did have an appetising mushroom odour, some people do seem to eat them but they have risks, and need to be cooked properly. First Time Foragers suggest cooking them without the stem:

"the closed young caps especially make ideal vessels for the stuffing and grilling/baking treatment. Or, you could tear the caps up into finger-food sized nuggets, coat in breadcrumbs or batter and deep fry "  

Below, how it looked yesterday:

Shaggy parasols typically grow "in troops or fairy rings in disturbed ground areas like roadsides, gardens, the edges of fields, and so on--often in the vicinity of conifers" (MushroomExpert.com).There were some others near this one but they looked nibbled and trampled, there were also some browner fungi nearby but they also looked too damaged to identify, they weren't Shaggy Parasols, but large LBJs (little brown jobs).

In relation to the Shaggy Parasol, First Time Foragers further clarify its identification with this:

"This mushroom has gills under the cap (some have tubes or spines) like those you find on the cultivated mushrooms that you buy at the supermarket. These, along with all of the mushroom’s flesh, turn a muddy red when bruised. This is an excellent feature to help determine identification: if the Shaggy Parasol you have picked does not bruise red then it is definitely something else and you must discard it. The stem is smooth, cream-coloured and also bruising red, and becoming very bulbous at the base. Shaggy Parasols with open caps leave a ring around the stem. This is double layered and can be moved, though may be a bit sticky, up and down the stem."

First Time Foragers: http://jpwaldron.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/the-shaggy-parasol/

MushroomExpert.Com:http://www.mushroomexpert.com/

Day 3: no sign of the Shaggy Parasol , it must have blown away in the overnight storm.

Deep in the woods

The Cox's walk entrance is gradual, like an audio fade, the horrible traffic  sounds on the South Circular attenuate as you walk up the steep pathway. The wide path is lined with sessile Oaks, two or even three deep on the cricket field/golf course side and two deep on the church/allotment side. The oak trunks on the allotment side are covered in Ivy, as are the outbuildings of the rotting Evangelical Church. A colony of rats scurries between the church and the cricket pitch. At the height of summer you also sees Nuthatches, Robins, Green Woodpeckers, Jackdaws, Crows, Grey Squirrels, Paraquetes, Magpies and other birds I don't know the names of.

The ground has a purple brown hue like expensive chocolate powder, steely blue stones have been pounded into it,  as I imagine they would have been when the railway line to the Great Exhibition was still active. Golden patches of sunlight break through the canopy of oak leaves. In summer you can hear flies and other insects buzzing around. In films and wildlife documentaries the sound of flies often signifies the imminent representation of a corpse, but in real life, at least in South London, it usually indicates the presence of a turd, canine or otherwise. The sounds of summer cricket matches irritate me, they seem pretentious and elitist, as fake as Morris Dancers and wenches. I hurry past the cricket field towards what I think of as the real woods.

At the top of Cox's Walk I cross the old railway bridge and pass through a high metal kissing gate that takes me into the 'proper' part of the woods, here there are more oaks and hornbeam  as well as huge trees from the time when grand houses had their back gardens spilling into the woods, with designer items like Cedar of Lebanon and Monkey Puzzle.

Information plaques dotted around the woods advertise the fact that there are 200 species of  trees and  plants here. I can smell wild garlic and bonfire smoke, it's the signature scent of Sydenham Hill Woods in summer.

At one end of the woods there is an abandoned railway  tunnel full of bats and debris. When I was at school myself and a group of friends crawled into the tunnel and walked all the way through it to Crystal Palace, half way through the tunnel we fell into a deep trench. For a second or two we experienced abject, cardiac, horror. Within a few breaths we all returned to a normal state. The incident is a vivid proof of emotional resilience, a psychological plasticity I wish I could invoke on demand.

Deep In the woods you can hear fragmented snippets of conversation as other people wonder along the densely lined pathways. The conversational fragments often have no visible people attached to them, though there might be brief flashes of non-green between the overlapping trees,  incongruous, man-made fabrics and bright Wellington boots. 

When I was a child there were no real pathways through the woods, even the old railway line was heavily overgrown. The woods felt far wilder, more dangerous, though it's unusual now to see a child playing on their own.  Most of the voices you hear in the woods are adults, middle-aged women like myself,  habitually drawn to the tiny wilderness.  When you do see people they are frequently the same ones - an old man with half his face paralysed, a tall man dragged along by a brace of huskies,  the odd stray dog walker from Streatham Common, extending their professional repertoire into South East London. The ragged rope swings and car tyre amusements of my youth have largely disappeared. There are no boys on motorbikes, habitual flashers or adolescent drinking parties, at least not by day. The woods have been thoroughly sanitised since the 1970s.


I'm drawn to the centre of the woods, a musky cleft  where the bird call is most resonant, where avian and human voices waft around me.
"I was trying to have an alcohol free weekend and realised the trick is to"
"Did I tell you about the strange man who came looking for my father?"
"Oh no, I  never do that"
The conversations fade into layers of green.

Sometimes I see and hear no one else in the Woods, at those times the woods are often like a stage set. The folly, in particular is sometimes more artificial than a real stage, more like a paper model. I have a profound astigmatism that tends to flatten objects, I do not benefit from the binocular disparity that helps most people to judge depth in objects, the world is not very real to me. I often experience it as shallow and contrived, more like a pop-up book then a convincing realm of 3 dimensional objects. The folly is an artifice deliberately constructed to resemble a ruined chapel. One day this summer it was covered in little green leaves like helicopter blades. For a few seconds I was filled with wonder.The green blades fell over me in their thousands, emitting papery rustles as they glided in spirals to the ground. 

Chlorophyllum rhacodes? Young Shaggy Parasol

Spotted this in Norwood Grove today, could it be a Young Shaggy Parasol, Chlorophyllum rhacodes ? It was under a conifer at the top of the field, which fits, It also has pale brown scales, it does not have the snakeskin stem of a regular parasol. I didn't disturb it but apparently when you cut one the gills turn from a cream colour to orange red, should smell sweet, but I forgot to give it a sniff! If it's still there next tomorrow I will do so...it hasn't got visible gills yet. maybe they will appear over night. if it isn't a shaggy parasol then my second guess is a Mosaic Puffball, but it doesn't really fit the bill. I also saw a beautiful pair of Great Spotted Woodpeckers in the same field, and what I think were Shrooms, Psilocybe semilanceata, AKA Magic Mushrooms,  in the field opposite the gate house, Drawing below:

There are lots of tiny fungi on the common at the moment but I find them very hard to identify..I'll try to remember to smell them and maybe get spore prints in future.
 "Shaggy Parasol produces very pale cream spores while Agaricus species produce dark brown or purplish-brown spores." according to First Nature .com, who also say it can be confused with Agaricus augustus, commonly known as The Prince, but I feel fairly confident about this now. The texture and shape are not like Agaricus augustus, which looks smoother, in photos at least.

Into the Would

I've spent a very large amount of time in the woods throughout this summer and early autumn 2014, running, walking, drawing and reading, watching the birds and just sitting, moping around. I  want to start writing about what that's like and why I am so drawn to the woods. I couldn't get the name Into The Wood (an homage to Thoreau, not Sondheim) but quite like the alternative, Into the Would. This misnomer suggests the woods as a place of imminent possibility, of daydreaming and spaciousness. So that's what I want this blog to be like, a big wild possible would.

On of my plans for this blog is to review some great tree themed books I've read recently including:

I'm going to start here with Sarah Maitland's Gossip from the Forest, which has (among other UK sites) really interesting chapters on London locations Sydenham Hill Woods and Epping Forest. Each of the twelve fairy stories is interspersed with an essay on forests, I usually skip the fictional bits when people try to do things like that, and this book is no exception, but it's still a rewarding read.  

"In this fascinating book, Maitland argues that the two forms are intimately connected: the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forests were both the background and the source of fairy tales. Yet both forests and fairy stories are at risk and their loss deprives us of our cultural lifeblood."

Sarah Maitland makes a convincing case for forests as the originary source of fairy tales and an even more important point about the role of urbanity and technology in eroding some of the mystery and magic of our forestsy imaginings. One of the things I love about Sydenham Hill Woods is the lack of phone and internet signal. In the absence of all that noise we can revert to a more embodied state. Deep in the forest I am quite literally unshackled from the grasp of work. 

Maitland makes the point that few children in the UK are now able to experience being in a forest on their own, and, if they are on their own, they have probably been given a phone to keep in touch. I spent a lot of time on my own and with other children in the Sydenham Hill Woods as a child in the 1970s. We did get into horrendous situations, but even so, in the long run, they may have been valuable, if traumatising, learning experiences....or just the side-effects of a life lived with any significant degree of freedom. 
"I seriously fear," the books says "that we are failing to nourish the beautiful and precious quality of resilience in our children."

The section in Gossip from the Forest about the New Forest presents an aptly complex relationship between cultural colonisation and the preservation of the forest, in fact it would not have thrived without the heavy handed Norman sequestering.  I read this book while camping in the New Forest and found it doubly magical for being there.

The book is earnest in places, but also beautiful to read at times, anyone whose been to Hertfordshire in the spring will know exactly what Sarah Maitland means when she writes of "the strange smoky shimmer"  of the Bluebell woods......

I've been trying to evoke the mystery and magic of the woods in my own work recently, to convey what Maitland describes as the "secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get to anywhere else".  In particular I like the passage away from Lordship Lane to the very centre of the woods, it evokes a kind of birth as well as a dream state, a return of some kind.

Above, the Cox' Walk, entrance to Sydenham Hill Woods. Below, the last remnant of the Great North Wood on Streatham Common,  both October 2014.

Fungi Day, Sydenham Hill Woods

Terana caerulea, Cobalt Crust fungus

The long awaited fungi walk took place in Sydenham Hill Woods today led by a very enthusing expert Dr Mark Spencer. There was a surprisingly wide range of fungi to look at, considering the long dry summer and autumn we've had so far. Apart from a few days of torrential rain this week it has been record-breakingly dry, so I didn't have high hopes for spotting fungi. The walk showed, yet again, how much we miss until we learn how to see.

I tried to keep track of what we saw, but no doubt have spelling errors and mishearings galore here. The image above is of a very dazzling fungi called Terana caerulea,  'cobalt crust fungus' or velvet blue spread,  the common name cobalt crust makes sense to me as the colour looks more like an inky cobalt blue then a cerulean. Dr Spencer said it was probably a first sighting of this fungi type for Sydenham Hill Woods and maybe a first for London. Wooo! We will tell our great grandchildren, grand nieces and nephews etc, 'we were there the day they found Terana caerulea on the fencing post in Sydenham Hill Woods!' They'll think we are exaggerating...strangely it seems to be the national fungus of Macedonia, judging by the postage stamp below:

Above, Fairy Inkcap, Coprinellus disseminatus as far as I can remember

Above, a very large and quite old Ganoderma australe, Southern Bracket fungi on a huge Ash tree.

Striking factoids: there are 10,000 fungi types in the UK and the number is going up. Handling fungi isn't dangerous, you can even nibble tiny amounts and it won't hurt you, the colour of gills isn't a safe way to identify fungi, as young and old ones can have different appearances. Smell is a useful identifier, if a fungi smells of radishes, acids drops, cleaning fluid, don't eat it.  Cabbages absorb heavy metals and other toxins, best not eaten if close to roads etc. Hygrocybe russocoriacea (Cedarwood Waxcap) smells of semen, also many species of Inocybe (Fibrecap) 'thus the smell can be a useful way to help separate this genus from other similar ‘LBJ’s (little brown jobs) such as Cortinarius (Webcap)' (from buckfungusgroup.com). 

Somewhat counter intuitively the smell of marzipan/bitter almonds can indicate an edible fungi like the Wood Mushroom, Agaricus silvicola, the best strategy if you are going to eat them is to get a repertoire of 4-5 that you know really well and stick to those, this makes sense. A more frightening fact is that in some communities there is genetically selected tolerance of fungi which can potentially kill outsiders, such as the Pie Crust fungi we found outside the Crescent Wood Road gate. The doc thinks those without immunity died out in the mycophiliac Eastern European communities that can safely eat them....outsiders should avoid mushroom soup if visiting Poland, the Czech Republic etc?

We also saw:

Auricularia, jelly ear, which someone pointed out has the fifth flavour taste Umami,  we were encouraged to try a tiny nibble of it, I thought it was quite tasty,  you can imagine having it in a noodle soup. On the logs in the wood they looked like a bunch of artificially grown ears, with a silicon=like texture.

Peeling Oysterling, Crepidotus mollis, a fan shaped rubbery, slimy little thing,very pale with a strong mushroomy smell, like a sachet of powdered mushroom soup.

Ascocoryne sarcoides, purple jellydisc, like a tiny alien tree or a rock pool creature, somewhere between purple and dark burgundy.

Daldinia concentrica, King Alfred's Cakes, or 'cramp balls', and 'coal fungus'. most of the ones we saw were still white, a cross section showed why they are concentrica, rings inside like a silvery cross section of an onion, pleasingly tactile when sliced into, with the quality of a conker or a nice stone.

The fungi that I found both intriguing and simultaneously horrifying was the Dog's Vomit slime, a plasmodium, Fuligo septica, this puke of a fungi is the stuff of sci-fi nightmares, it is a fungi that can move and navigate mazes, with the appalling implication that it has a limited capacity for both memory and logic, like computing undergraduates...

We saw the lovely, fragile, Mycena sanguinolenta, Bleeding Bonnets, they left scarlet tears in our hands. 

 

I was very delighted to have my poisonous Sulfur Tuft (above left) Hypholoma fasciculare, sighting in the woods confirmed,  and also surprised to discover that what I thought was grey or crested coral was actually the highly edible, Grifola frondosa, Hen of the Woods (above right) , just goes to show how challenging identification can be, you wont find me eating wild fungi in a hurry. I saw both types a few weeks ago in the Sydenham Hill Woods.

,

Not sure specifically which type the above are, the genus name  is Psathyrella,could be multipedata, many feet? The caps are very fragile and easily fall off.

 A bunch of examples including the little Earpick fungus, Auriscalpium vulgare (left hand-side of the lid), I can't remember the names of the other ones, at that point I got distracted by a very sweet Jack Russell in a Diamante Collar and a Dachshund puppy (was the big one on the right a Suede Bolete, Xerocomus subtomentosus?).

Just outside the Crescent Wood Road gate someone found a Paxillus involutus or Pie Crust fungi (poison pax?).Despite its potentially unpleasant impact on human health it's one of those fungi that forms a usefully symbiotic relationship with trees, attenuating diseases and heavy metals (as well as other musical genres?). A great way to end this walk.

After hearing about the mycologist Julius Schäffer's (no doubt excruciating) death from auto-immune catastrophe as a result of eating a pie crust fungi in 1944, I was quite convinced I'd never eat another mushroom again, until I got to Cafe St Germain in Crystal Palace and had scrambled eggs and mushrooms for a late lunch. All in all this was an ideal way to spend a Saturday afternoon, thanks to Dr Mark Spencer, Daniel Greenwood and the London wildlife Trust for this fantastic walk.

Sapro- – prefix meaning rottenSaprobic / saprophytic gaining nutrients from dead material

Short article on edible fungi here:http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/fungi-mushroom-magic-426427.html

Recommended Fungi books: