The Shroom Room

The start of mushroom season is finally upon us, and I couldn't be more excited. Although the bouts of rain weren't ideal for our wedding last week, they did mean lots of exciting finds during our honeymoon, walking through damp North Wales. I will no doubt make many posts about the intriguing finds we stumbled across during our time away, but I wanted to start at our first fungal encounter, the Dung Roundhead , or Stropharia semiglobata. Scattered across the huge pastures we were walking through were hundreds of them. And though the name suggests they grow exclusively on dung, the majority of them were in fact beside dung. The gills are adnate and ranged in colour depending on the age of the mushroom. Younger ones had a more purplish tinge to them, while the more mature species had black gills. The spore print is a dark purplish-brown colour. Characteristics Habitat:  On or beside dung, usually in pasture. Cap:  1-3cm across, hemispherical. Cream to y...

Another day, another nature reserve. I found Forest Farm & Glamorgan Canal Nature Reserve  completely by chance, as I saw it on the map when working out how to get somewhere else. As I had a couple of hours to spare, I thought I'd take a little stroll to see what was there, and I was awestruck with how beautiful it is. It's a really big reserve, so I didn't get very far, but what I managed to see was breathtaking. There's a canal path that you can walk along, a public footpath that goes through a wooded area, or open fields. Along the wooded path there are the sounds of lots of different birds and the smell of wild garlic. And, to my delight, lots of species of fungi. As I came across a rotting stump, there was no way I could have missed the clumps of Sulphur Tuft , or Hypholoma fasciculare. Aptly named, they are sulphur yellow in colour and grow in tufts on dead wood, pretty much all year round. They have a very distinctive mushroom smell, and their gills ...