The Wild Mushroom Season 2011 is Now Open!

In Sussex at least, it's been a slow build-up this year, unlike last year's long drought followed by an explosion of activity in early September.  We've had a lot of rain over the last few weeks, and there's been plenty of agaricuses, boletes, russulas, brackets, puffballs and other summer fungi about.   So here's hoping that 2011 is going to be another bumper year for mushrooms.

 Earlier this month somebody posted what has to be my favourite picture ever posted to wildmushroomsonline.co.uk.   There are a few species fungi that are bit special for mycologists and conservationists, because of their intrinsic beauty and rarity, and this is certainly one of them:

 This is obviously a great photo of mushrooms growing in an urban environment.  These aren't any old mushrooms though.  This is Volvariella bombycina or the Silky Rosegill, which isn't particularly common anywhere in the UK and is more likely to turn up in a rural nature reserve than on "one of the busiest streets in North London".  It is, in my opinion, the most beautiful wild mushroom that grows in the UK (check out some of the pictures on the internet if you don't believe me).  They have an almost angelic quality.  They are also very good to eat, although not generally on the menu due to their rarity.   They are a close relative of the cultivated  paddy straw mushroom

(Volvariella volvacea).

 These particular specimens are obviously safe from the attention of foragers, given that nobody is likely to want to eat something growing that close to a busy road and no doubt visited by lots of dogs.   It is likely that the spores arrived in the area on the tyres of a car, and given the location of these fruiting bodies it is likely that many new spores will be taken away by more car tyres.   Who knows…maybe this species will start turning up all over North London! 

 This is a good time to remind readers and users of this website not to pick fungi they don't recognise.  Fortunately, the person who posted this picture of V. bombycina did not decide to pick the mushrooms and post a picture of them sitting on a chopping board. 

This would have made them harder to identify anyway, but the real problem is that fruiting bodies like these can go on releasing spores for quite a long time and cutting them down in their prime would have been a terrible waste. 

These are something of an iconic example (perhaps the fungal equivalent of a dormouse) but there are thousands of species of fungi in the UK, most of which are uncommon or rare.  This photo demonstrates that even if what you've found is growing on a busy street in the middle of the largest city in Europe, it may still be unusual enough to warrant protection.  

If you are new to foraging for fungi, then the procedure you should follow is to make a hit-list of about ten or twenty of the more common and most easily-identified species and go out specifically hunting for those.  If you find anything else, especially if there's only two or three, please just take a photo in-situ.  If there's more than that, just take one for cutting in half or examining the underside of the cap, and leave the rest to do what they naturally do.

 Anyway…thanks to user Ergin for posting such a wonderful picture, and good luck to fungus foragers searching for more pickable quarry!  It's mushroom time again.