Scarlet elf-cups have opened. So much stranger and more animal than flowers of snowdrops and lesser celandines, these bloody, little, inside-out mushrooms of the fungus Sarcoscypha austriaca appear as envoys of a parallel season. They materialise at the end of winter, not as heralds of spring but of a perpetual autumn in the realm of rot.
The storm-drama of wind and rain thrashing through trees above defines the day, but the elf-cups blooming in the quietly rotting debris of previous storms belong to a hardly noticeable world. The fungus feeds on fallen sticks in the damp, mossy shadows under trees. Its gauze of weaving filaments infiltrates cells of dead wood to digest the timber and return it to the soil.
The storm is rewilding. It owes much of its ferocity to our agency that creates climate chaos but, despite being branded with a human name, the storm is immune to attempts to domesticate it and is crushingly indifferent; it cares nothing for what we care about. It seeks out vulnerabilities in the architecture of trees, wrenching, twisting, jamming into fractures, bursting them open, breaking, uprooting, overturning – the macro equivalent of the micro workings of the fungus. Weather and fungi are in league with each other, a creative-destructive pact for the disintegration, decay and rejuvenation of the forest.
The scarlet elf-cups carry their folklore lightly. They are brightly otherworldly and are left behind by elves, pixies, fairies and those populations of supernatural folk once commonplace in rural culture – now, even talking about them, the words seem so distantly extinct. Medicinal properties, culinary curiosity and scientific revelations keep fungi culturally in the exotically weird, a fifth column in the service of a more-than-human-worldliness. Perhaps instead of seeing the elf-cups as receptacles of myth, they may be thought of as sensory structures.
Passing Jodrell Bank on the train, the radio telescopes seem to echo elf-cups on a massive scale. The great dishes listening to the sky, receiving signals from the galactic radio, are gross, dull versions of the tiny scarlet ears picking up the storm frequency, transmitting space capsule spores into the future, connecting a microscopic world to the void.
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