Every winter this gently sloping bank on the outside of a bend in the Wear is swept clean by flood water. When spring arrives buried plant life reasserts itself through layers of sandy silt deposited when the river has swirled through the alders.
First the snowdrops spear through the surface. Last time we passed this way yellow star of Bethlehem flowers had appeared among emerging wild garlic leaves. On this day, less than a month later, the vegetation was a waist-high mosaic of butterbur, sweet cicely, ground elder and cranesbill leaves.
Our fungal foray, to find morels was not going to be easy. This was their season. These toadstools, Morchella esculenta, are prized by gourmets, and seem to thrive here, though only sporadically. On one memorable occasion we found dozens, but in some years there have been none.
We were about to give up when we spotted the first – its convoluted, toffee-coloured, cap not much larger than a golf ball. After that, with a search image in our brain, finding more became easier.
Morchella esculenta, lurking under the spring vegetation and belonging to a division of the fungal kingdom called the Ascomycota, or “spore shooters”, have a secretive, alien, beauty. Even as we watched the morels must have been firing their volleys of invisible spores from microscopic, flask-shaped, sporangia embedded in those honeycomb caps.
The deceptively similar false morel, Gyromitra esculenta, which we found further along the footpath on the edge of a recently felled Scots pine plantation, is more sinister. Its cap, resembling a chestnut-brown brain erupting through the soil, has looser, smoother, corrugations. Brushing away the soil beneath I could see a short white stalk that would eventually raise it above ground level.
Morels can cause severe stomach upset if not properly cooked, but the perils of eating false morels are infinitely worse. As with the consumption of death caps catastrophic liver damage can set in after eating Gyromitra esculenta. About one in seven such poisonings of people are fatal.
Adventurous mycophiles claim this fungus is edible if very thoroughly cooked. Call me a coward if you like, but simply finding both of these organisms from the underworld, whose appearance can never be predicted, is excitement enough.
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