There is something uncannily alien about living jelly. Lobes of brown, gelatinous fungus growing out of dead and fallen branches are jelly ear, Auricularia auricula-judae. Once called the Judas’s ear fungus because it often grows on the elder, the tree Judas Iscariot was supposed to have hanged himself on, it was mistranslated in the casual racism of 16th-century English as Jew’s ear.
Also known as wood ear, it has an orangey brown to a deep chocolatey colour. It is edible (not tried it yet) and, as the “fungus sambuca” of the old herbalists, has a medicinal history as a cure for sore throat and jaundice and as an astringent; it is used more widely in Chinese medicine. It contains chemicals that are anti-tumour, hypoglycaemic and cholesterol-lowering; as a source of natural melanin it has great potential in the fields of pharmacology, cosmetics and nutraceuticals – foods containing additional functional ingredients such as antioxidants, phytochemicals and vitamins.
The fruiting bodies do appear very ear-like. Their consistency is unsettling, a kind of unstill wobble as if animate, and a reminder that fungi are closer to animals than plants. The ears look as though they are listening, the sensory organs of invisible beings that infiltrate the trees and are part of a hidden intelligence.
What are they listening to? Rain. More liquid than solid themselves, the jelly ears listen to rain that feels as if it has fallen almost constantly since last autumn. The floods that have threatened the lives of towns and settlements a few miles away around Ironbridge and Shrewsbury, and caused the countless deaths of animals swept away or drowned in burrows, whisper to the jelly ears of our failure to understand the life of rivers such as the Severn, and the hills and farmland that feed it, now that the climate has changed so much.
Jelly ears listen to the rain because it tells them the fruiting time and when to release hundreds of thousands of spores, when to germinate and how to alter their competitive balance with other fungi in dead wood. Increased rainfall and temperature is giving jelly ear a much wider range of hosts. Rot is the future.
