A hectare of deciduous woodland produces about five tons of autumn leaves or wood, and much of this refuse is consumed by fungi. Even so, our long cultural association of these remarkable organisms with death or decay seems bizarre. Today a beechwood called Corbar is a perfect spot to ponder the issues.
The most magical part of it is where a recent death occurred. This 150-year-old beech tree was felled and cut into lengths, leaving a linear trench about 50m long, through the canopy and on to the woodland floor, so that sunlight has pooled on its prostrate carcass in unaccustomed abundance.
This rather theatrical space has since been smothered in moss and the deadwood decorated with a flowerbed-like array of fruiting mushrooms. Their colours are extraordinary: columns of sheathed woodtuft, with bonnets of cinnamon-ginger; in the pile of the moss are tiny spiny-edged orange discs called common eyelash; along the log lengths extrude dirty white spheres of lumpy bracket, and while their upper surfaces may be knobbly and mildewed with algae, the undersides are a uniform if complex sequence of minute ridge and furrow structures that multiply into exquisite honeycomb patterns.
Indisputably the most beautiful are the turkey-tails. Each “feather fan” has concentric if irregular bands – bronze, copper, iron grey, burgundy-brown, mahogany and terminating in a magnesium-white flange. But all overlap down the sides of the curving trunk so that they create these receding tidelines of wavy colour. No rose is more lovely.
Yet beauty only hints at the momentous importance of fungi, which we are slowly coming to appreciate are part of a foundational trinity – with plants and insects – for all life, including our own and everything we consume. The study of fungus is – as a spokesperson announces in Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake’s fabulous book on the subject – a “neglected megascience”. To our wilful disregard we can add the charge of criminal destruction. Fungi may lie at the foundation of civilisation but, in return, by 2021 we were spending more than $18bn worldwide on fungicide chemicals. It begs the question whether the fungal associations with death aren’t a more accurate projection of our own inner natures.
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