Ruud Kleinpaste: Spotting fungi

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

A week ago I noticed one of those beautiful red toadstools in our garden – the classic red fungus with white dots all over the skin.

Amanita muscaria or Fly agaric – there are a few different sub-species with different colourations (orange-red to yellow, and various colours of the “dots”). This is a Mycorrhizal fungus that is associated with a few common host trees: Birch, beech and pine trees. It’s not very edible – in fact, it’s better not to muck around with. Some young children have ended up being poisoned and some rather risky adults (trying to go on a Hallucinogenic journey) ended up in similar troubles.

But they look great, and this was the first time I saw this species in our front garden, which surprised me. Of course, I never saw the 7-meter tall Betula which really need pruning away from electricity wires…

Many species are doing a great job in recycling dead materials, fallen leaves, and dead branches, and also dead trunks in all shapes and sizes.

These are some examples of fungi doing the recycling job in forests – small and large and colourful.

Ear Fungus is often found on dead trunks of trees.

This is a weird looking, feeling, and tasting mushroom that can hardly be misidentified: It looks like a human ear, it feels like an ear, and it even tastes like an ear!

This edible fungus was the very first export article that was sent from New Zealand to China in the eighteen hundreds. The Chew Chong brothers in Taranaki were the first people to send container loads of these fungi by ship.

Gardeners will encounter fungi that cause all sorts of problems in fruit (fruit rots), in roots (Phytophthora), and in stems and on leaves. Often preventative gardening will reduce the problems developing. Copper sprays tend to protect a plant from Spores settling on the developing fruit.

Brown Rot on Apricot

What I love to see is interaction between fungi and insects. Here is a stinkhorn fungus with a decent amount of smelly, brown liquid. Flies are keen to harvest that brown stinky stuff and in doing so, they get the brown spores on their body. Those spores are distributed through gardens and forests.

Autumn is the time to go for a walk and just look at fungi; I reckon they actually run this planet!

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