Country diary: A frightful fungus worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe tale

Dead moll’s fingers: ‘Miniature hands of slender, spongy fingers attached to skeletal wrists, reaching up from the shallow grave of a decaying sycamore branch.’ Photograph: Phil Gates

I have come on an annual pilgrimage, this autumn afternoon, along a muddy track under a tunnel of trees, in search of two toadstools that fire the imagination. One is almost extraterrestrial in appearance, the other a Halloween horror story from the underworld.

Until two years ago, in a lifetime of looking, I had never seen an earthstar. But then a naturalist told me about a colony of these most charismatic toadstools, rare in our region, growing on a bank beside this path. And here they are again today, collared earthstars, Geastrum triplex, half hidden among ivy, looking like invaders from another planet.

Each began when barely visible underground hyphae coalesced into an egg-shaped object on the soil surface. Now the outer rind has split into segments that are folded back, like spacecraft landing-module ramps, revealing a sphere with a pore in the top, ready to puff clouds of spores whenever a raindrop splashes against its paper-thin walls.

A collared earthstar. ‘Now the outer rind has split into segments that are folded back, like spacecraft landing-module ramps.’ Photograph: Phil Gates

As the autumn days grow shorter, the fleshy rays will curl back further, eventually levering the whole toadstool from the ground. Then it will be free for the wind to carry away across the landscape, like tumbleweed, shedding more spores as it bounds. If evolution’s twin forces of chance and necessity hadn’t already crafted this unlikely fungus, then HG Wells might surely have invented it for a role in The War of the Worlds.

Further down the path, another toadstool, this one worthy of a gruesome Edgar Allan Poe horror story: dead moll’s fingers, Xylaria longipes. Miniature hands of slender, spongy fingers attached to skeletal wrists, reaching up from the shallow grave of a decaying sycamore branch. This species has an explosive method for finding new hosts, shooting spores from microscopic flasks clustered in pits on its surface: fungal artillery, silent, unseen, performing its seasonal bombardment.

The sun is setting, daylight has begun to fade. A chill has settled over the wood. Time for a final deep breath of glorious autumnal scent before heading home, lungs filled with the aroma of damp earth, decaying leaves and, no doubt, some spores of earthstar and dead moll’s fingers.

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