Shropshire Fungus Group Newsletter 2017 Grifola frondosa – photo by Philip Leather Contents 1. A question for you – Jo Weightman 2. The Old Man of the Woods – Ted Blackwell 3. A new member writes... – Martin Scott 4. Foray at home! – Les Hughes 5. Bury Ditches foray – Jo Weightman 6. Pre-historic tinder fungi – Ted Blackwell 7. Foray at the Hurst – Rob Rowe 8. Another new member writes – Concepta Cassar 9. BMS Study week 2016 – Ray James 10. Foray at the Bog – Jo Weightman 11. Earthstars at Lydbury North – Rob Rowe 12. Foray at Oswestry Racecourse – Susan Leather 13. Some pictures from 2016 14. A foreign fungus – Les Hughes 15. The answer to the question A question for you from Jo Weightman What do these four have in common? Buglossoporus quercinus Laetiporus sulphureus Polyporus squamosus Polyporus umbellatus All photos copyright Jo Weightman Answer at the end! Who first called it “Old Man of the Woods”? The toadstool Strobilomyces strobilaceus is obviously one of the Boletus Tribe but differs in several ways. Apart from its striking appearance, the spore print is violaceus-to-black, and although not poisonous it is not considered worth eating. It doesn’t usually decay readily and mummified specimens can sometimes be found still standing in the woods tinged with green algae and encroaching mosses long after the fruiting season. The late Dr Derek Reid of Kew Mycology considered the Severn Valley to be its UK headquarters and although there are approaching 50 Shropshire records on the national database (FRDBI), however it was not recorded in the county between 2008 and 2016. The scientific name is from Classical Greek and translates as “fircone fungus” by which it is often referred to in popular reference books, but as if honouring a long-established tradition, ‘Old Man of the Woods’ has been adopted as the official Recommended English Name. The name presumably arising from its lingering woodland presence and shaggy 2 unkempt appearance. It’s a name to evoke hoary images of gnarled and crooked hulks of ancient trees and scenes of sylvan rustic folk-lore lost in the mists of time. But earlier UK fungus reference books don’t mention that name and as far as the UK is concerned there doesn’t appear to be anyhint of historic folk-lore. The name seems to make its first entry into UK literature about the 1970s. Where did it come from, what was its origin? Perhaps an American import that caught-on with UK authors? A new member writes... The Calvatia Gigantea (Giant Puffball) is alive and well, and living in Shropshire. The Shropshire Fungus Group has recorded a healthy history of the fungus in the county, from William Phillips Hamilton’s record of a foray in Minsterley in 1897 through to a Church Stretton cemetery sighting in 2007. But since 2007, for the vicecounty of Salop, there have been no further records for C. Gigantea added to the Fungal Records Database of Britain & Ireland. Giant Puffballs have always excited, and until 2016 also eluded, me, so maybe the same is true of the wider Shropshire community… or maybe they’re just so magical and unreal that we marvel at them, and then, like an imagined glimpse of another world, we forget precisely what we saw as soon as it leaves our line of sight – as if it couldn’t have existed in the first place. “It looks like a discarded ice cream tub. Or maybe it’s a big milk carton that someone’s thrown out?” I puzzled to my partner, C, as we abled over a Telfordian field, and gazed at a white blob in the distance. We have a game, C and I, we call it ‘Is It A Mushroom, Or Is It Rubbish?’ More often than not the exciting bright yellow-orange thing in a tree is a Sainsbury’s carrier bag, rather than a giant Laetiporus Sulphureus, the suspected Amanita Muscaria turns out to be a chewn-up ball, and the interesting pale fungi turns out to be a less-than-interesting present left by a passing canine. “Well if you think it’s something, you might as well go and look – I’m not going to bother,” said C, puppy to hand. And I’m glad that I did. As the distant blob resolved I started to wonder if I’d come across a human skull. Surely not? But then, I have heard say that dog walkers are often the discoverers of unfortunate events from the night (or month) before. “Oh wow! C! C! You’ve got to come and look!” Nestled amongst a strimmed-back bed of nettles on the border between grazing land and hard woodland, a perfect giant puffball, about the size of a small football, shone in the evening sunlight. A twist and a pull and it was up, and I was doing my best Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick; I knew him well.” I was too excited to worry about how hackneyed it was to jump straight into the famous lines. Eating foraged fungi is not always a wise pursuit. But, fortunately, the keen amateur mycologist knows that there are not many things one could confuse with a foot-wide bone- 3 white puffball. Clyde M. Christensen, in his 1943 book ‘Common Edible Mushrooms’, includes all puffballs in his ‘Foolproof Four’. Descriptions in the book are troublingly scant about the variability of puffballs, and I’m sure that a first-timer might mistakenly gather a large number of earthballs in excitement and delight, only to take them home, halve them, and get an unpleasant surprise, so one would be unlikely to find such a ‘gung-ho’ publication today. However, the giant puffball is a nice easy one, and I felt no guilt plucking the specimen as it sat surrounded by those that had come before it. 1.2 kilograms of (a single) puffball takes a while to consume, but we managed it – griddled like a steak, in pancakes with sage for breakfast, added to a stew – it kept us going for days. The next time we made it out on an amble, 70 miles east of the previous find, but at almost exactly the same latitude, we stumbled across another smaller specimen – we’d gone from three decades never seeing a giant puffball to finding two in almost as many days. C and I are excited to join the Shropshire Fungus Group this coming year, and to discover all of the wonderful Salopian fungi that we didn’t really get many of, over in Leicestershire, our previous home – for example, it seems we can barely move for Sarcoscypha coccinea or Auricularia auricula-judae around the Ironbridge Gorge. Foray at home! Are you fed up of tramping through woods and sifting through piles of litter to find your fungi? Well stop right now and adopt a new approach. Foraying at home can produce impressive results, and allow you to find rare and unusual fungi without stirring more than a few yards from your door. Of course it is a little more time consuming. My interest in mycology only stretches back a decade or so, but already I’ve got more than twenty species on my home foray list. My early interest was edible fungus, and after my first foray, having been told that Honey Fungus is edible (and it was a good year for Honey Fungus), I brought home a huge collection and cooked a good bit of it up. I’m not sure now if displaying it on the garden table was a good idea, because I think it has got its own back, spread its spores around the garden, and is currently besieging my Victoria Plum tree, with an enormous ring of fruit bodies all around. Last year it killed a winter-flowering Viburnum, and this year my pet Alder, raised from a seedling rescued from the wall of a canal dock in South Wales in 1983, failed to put out even a single leaf. That might be bad news for another of my fungal finds. I share my plum crop with a brown rot, only last year identified as Monilinia fruticola, so if my plum tree dies so does the Monilinia (although it still lives in my other plum tree at the back). That tree regularly plays host to a tidy little collection of Glistening Inkcaps, which appear at its base, but the tree still thrives. Nearby is the remains of an apple tree, which we had to sacrifice to allow more light into the vegetable garden. That played host first to Chondrostereum purpureum, and only last year to Bjerkandra adusta. 4 The first time I saw Tubaria furfuracea, a genus I hadn’t even heard of at that time, was when I found it growing at the bottom of a log pile, waiting to be burnt. And some old decking, now removed, played host for a while to Hypholoma fasiculare. A log I was given as a present, intended to produce a fine crop of Shitake mushrooms, managed a single fruit body, before turning over control to Stereum hirsutum. In addition to playing host to Honey Fungus my lawn also produces an occasional Marasmius oreades, but not in a ring, and not with any regularity. More frequently it offers a home to Panaeolini foensecii, one of the first fungi I identified using a microscope, by seeing the ornamentation on the spores under oil. Adjacent to the lawn is a gravel path. I think it is an original path from when the house was built in the 1840s. I moved in in 1987, and in 2010 up popped a single Morel, Morchella vulgaris.