Going mushrooming is a perilous business: they are just so darn difficult to identify. Luckily, I am with my friend Hannah, who’s an ecologist, but even she is occasionally stumped. We’re on safe ground on the sheep-nibbled grass where the white blobs are easily identifiable as snowy waxcaps (Cuphophyllus virgineus). Their widely spaced gills, stem and cap all seem to be made of the same material, as though they’d been carved out of old church candles.
The delicate grey mushroom poking up out of the leaf litter on the forest floor is a different matter. Its three-inch-high stem is a single dark filament on which is balanced a tiny bell-like cap. The fine lines that radiate from centre to edge might have been painted by a Mughal miniaturist’s single squirrel-hair brush.
I consult my guidebook using what Hannah assures me is a valid scientific approach known as “the flicky-flicky method”. It could be any one of half a dozen species, all with impossibly long Latin names, so I decide to call it Akbar’s earring.
Further into the wood, we discover a fallen trunk, encrusted with bracket fungi, as tough as bark and patterned in concentric dark brown and creamy rings, their outer lips rimmed in pure white. Trying to prise one off is as hard as detaching a whelk from a pier. We dub this fungi city Crenellated Balcony.
By now, we are on a roll. “Nipple-headed fairy mushroom,” I declare confidently, of one of the 102 types of Mycena. “Ah yes, and look over here: maroon-velvet oak clumpers,” says Hannah, of what turns out to be spindle shank.
Meanwhile, the creamy-white mushrooms, whose wavy caps flare and billow, displaying their frilly gills like a chorus girl’s knickers, could only possibly be called marilyns (though others might call them trooping funnel).
Some, though, already have fabulously apt names: yellow brain fungus is impossible to better. But many poisonous varieties – and herein lies the peril – look like edible ones. There’s even a whole group of them known as deceivers (we found a beautiful purple-mauve one, the amethyst deceiver, which was – ironically – impossible to mistake).
But my favourite are puffballs, genus Lycoperdon, which Hannah informs me – and here she’s not kidding – means “wolf’s farts”. I do love the autumn.
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