5

Fungus

The autumn is my best of times. When the September rains blow in from the west the trees in our woodland are so soaked that raindrops cascade off the leaves on to the forest floor. Dry leaf litter that has lain under the trees for many weeks soon becomes sodden. Mossy banks in the wood that have looked crisp and almost moribund all summer awake within a few days into fresh green cushions that are cool to the touch. Their long wait is over, and now just as the leaves complete their year’s work the mosses start to grow and propagate. Rotten logs absorb water into their brown flesh. Smells of rot and growth subtly mesh to infuse the woods with a distinctive fragrance – the combined emanations of freshly dampened earth and all the microscopic life that is grateful for the rain. It is a good smell, one that makes you breathe in deeply. Crane flies bumble through the undergrowth, legs dangling. Myriads of lesser flies emerge from hiding to buzz about to mate or feed. Birds that like to eat insects hop enthusiastically from twig to twig; wood pigeons in small groups scavenge in the litter for morsels to fatten them up for winter. Much of this awakening is invisible, as it takes place below ground when the rainwater finally trickles into cracks and interstices to moisten the soil and subsoil. Uncountable multitudes of woodlice and springtails and mites, and billions of single-celled organisms reinvigorate the soil and provoke roots into action. This hidden world is the concealed vital organ for the health of the wood, its stomach and nervous system. In a couple of weeks a whole kingdom will be made manifest: mushrooms will start to heave up from beneath the moist litter, their caps opening out as they rise, announcing their arrival in colours ranging from gentle tans to startling reds. The fungus season has arrived. It is the time of year when I feel most indisputably alive.

Now is the moment to retrieve the basket from the basement. An old-fashioned basket is just the job, put together from interwoven laths of willow; it has seen years of service. Nowadays, I often lead small parties dedicated to the scientific sampling of British fungi. We call them fungus ‘forays’. ‘Foraging’ is something else. Everything foraged is grist to the saucepan, but a foray will bring home all manner of fungal oddities that might break your teeth or send you mad if you included them in a risotto. The fungus enthusiast will not reject a tiny mushroom growing from an acorn cupule, nor yet discard a black jelly hanging sinisterly from a branch or an orange patch on rotten timber. That is not to say that the pleasures of eating mushrooms are lost on forayers. It is rather that the edible varieties are a fringe benefit. The Kingdom of Fungi is the main event.

When conditions are just right there is nothing more pleasing than walking out on a sunny October day into woodland that you know will be teeming with mushrooms. There are occasions when mushrooms are so abundant it is hardly possible to avoid crushing them underfoot. Nor are any two years identical, especially given the British climate, so every year will produce something that you have never seen before. The only problem with mushrooms is that all the species tend to arrive at once: the better the foray the slower the progress. I know of one forayer who never got beyond the car park. If it is done properly, forayers slowly amble along turning over rotting logs and picking up and examining every small mushroom with a hand lens. It is not aerobic exercise. Oblique shafts of light illuminate the forest floor when the sun gets lower, painting up the glowing caps of red brittlegills, or shining on the glutinous white fruitings of porcelain fungus lined up along old beech logs. Meanwhile, a real specialist might only gather small spots discolouring the leaves of brambles or woodland grasses. When something unusual is discovered a cry goes up and everyone gathers round to admire the find. Names – often scientific names – are bandied about with aplomb. It could be the first time Rubroboletus satanus (Satan’s bolete) has been seen here for twenty years! Its fat red stem and contrasting white cap pinpoint it at once. Some fungi are collected carefully and put into small jars or compartmentalised boxes to be taken home for examination under a microscope, which is the only way they can be accurately identified. Like the hunt for a superior trilobite in a fossil-rich quarry it is all about the thrill of the chase, except that ‘chase’ is about the least appropriate word for a rapt traipse through a wood molto lento. Nonetheless, there is an element of competitiveness as to who discovers the most beautiful, or recherché, or outstandingly delicious find of the day. Enthusiasm is undiminished as the light begins to fade: a fanatical friend continued to foray by the light of his car headlamps when he was convinced that a really uncommon species had to be out there. It often comes as a surprise to first-timers that there are so many different species of fungi. A good foray in the New Forest easily succeeds in finding more than 150 different species. A largely different set of species – but just as many – would be recovered from a foray in the Highlands of Scotland. Naturalists who devote their lives to birds or orchids, and know every species as well as they know their own family, often pass over the whole Kingdom of Fungi as too prolific, too unpredictable; just too difficult altogether.

My old woven basket, used for collecting fungi.

I cannot pin down my fungal epiphany. I am sure it was after the bird’s egg phase, and I am quite convinced that it ran concurrently with the chemi-shed. This young naturalist and scientist found everything worth attention; rather than analyse a part of nature, I sought to learn it all. This was not a conscious ambition – it was rather an instinct that could not be denied. It is as if I were no more than a pair of perceptive, but disembodied eyes observing everything – not unfocused, but voracious. Art and architecture, books and birds, fossils and fungi, were part of a portfolio that knew no limits. Charles Darwin’s Autobiography reveals that he, too, was restlessly hungry to know about everything. He started on beetles. He became a geologist: on the Beagle voyage he made fundamental observations on the geological history of South America, and the origin of oceanic atolls. His visit to the Galapagos Islands – the finches and giant tortoises he discovered there – fuelled the theory of the origin of species by natural selection. He devoted several years to a study of barnacles. Orchids, primroses and worms were grist to his intelligence, and all yielded to his brilliance. My only resemblance to the great man is in the range of my early curiosity; I cannot make similar claims about its depth.

If I cannot exactly remember when I first became engrossed with mushrooms I can remember why. They seemed so extraordinarily alien. They appeared so rapidly, and disappeared again with equal dispatch. One day in late summer an old stump in the garden at Ainsdale Road was surrounded by a dozen or so brown mushrooms, with caps shaped like closed umbrellas. A day or two later some of the umbrellas had opened further out, but by the following day many of them had turned into a black mush, and it was not long before all evidence of the mysterious visitors had completely vanished. I wondered how they fed themselves and how they grew so fast. I thought that if they disappeared so quickly they must have achieved what they had set out to do, but I had no idea what that might be. A few weeks later they were back again, if not in such great numbers. My mother said they were nasty toadstools[1] and not to touch them, but it was too late. I had already picked one, which had fallen to pieces in my hand, revealing that the cap sheltered many thin dark parallel sheets underneath that I would soon learn to call gills (I was used to seeing fish gills, so I could see how this name came about). The toadstool had so little substance, yet I could see where bark had been levered away from the tree by the action of a single toadstool pushing through. I soon found other toadstools to compare with the first: small pale ones appeared in the grass in the lawn. When we were by the River Lambourn I discovered a huge, white puffball, larger than a loaf. It looked like a balloon that had somehow been exhaled from the ground among the nettles. It was a fungus – but was it a mushroom? It was so different from the ones around the stump it was hard to see how they could be the same kind of organism. Both mushroom and puffball were imbued with mystery, and all mysteries demand to be investigated.

A book was needed. As always during the 1950s the book was one of the Observer series. The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi by Elsie M. Wakefield was first published in 1954, which does place an approximate date on the awakening of my interest. It would be hard to overstate the importance of these little books to budding naturalists in the post-war years. They were compact, small enough to fit into a schoolboy’s pocket. They were generally written in a straightforward way by people who knew their stuff. They were well illustrated for the time, although by modern standards the pictures seem rather small. They crammed a lot of information into 200 or so pages. And the books were inexpensive. I had the butterfly volume, and the ones on freshwater fish, birds, and wildflowers, but for these there were other options. The mushroom volume was the only guide of its kind. There were specialised scientific monographs, to be sure, but these were out of reach to the lay reader. Elsie M. Wakefield was a pioneering woman scientist – a professional mycologist. The names I learned from Wakefield’s book have stuck obstinately in my memory and refuse to be displaced by those preferred by later classifications based on modern understanding. I still find myself blurting out ‘Hypholoma hydrophilum’ to a bewildered (and much younger) fellow forayer when confronting a dense mass of chocolate brown caps on a decaying log. ‘Do you mean Psathyrella piluliformis?’ comes a rather discombobulated reply. ‘The same thing!’ say I, confidently. It is just that it has changed its name, but not its identity since the days of the Observer’s Book, which is what often happens with scientific taxonomy. Somehow, calling this toadstool the ‘common stump brittlestem’ – a name invented for it recently to sidestep a supposedly popular aversion to scientific names – seems less satisfying than announcing the whole classical mouthful. The common mushrooms that made up most of the entries in the Observer’s Book are still the ones that turn up regularly on forays, and include the best edibles as well as the most lethal. It provided a good grounding.

I did my own solitary forays thanks to London buses. Red double-decker buses served the city and its suburbs, as they still do today. Beyond that network green buses crossed from the outer suburbs into the countryside. You could get to most places around the perimeter of London by bus: smokers and people who liked to see where they were going went upstairs, and the latter included me. London Transport had a bargain ticket called a Green Rover that allowed you the freedom of the whole network, and the Young Traveller Green Rover was even better value. I must have been about thirteen when I took my basket to Ruislip Woods one autumn with my copy of Wakefield’s little book tucked into my pocket. Some of this ancient woodland has since been gobbled up by housing, but then it was an extensive tract of beech, oak and other broadleaved trees, with at least one conifer plantation. Paths led into deep rides, and even from the top of the bus I could see mushrooms dotting the roadside verges. I set off into the wood with my senses tingling, with the same nervous awareness that I felt when seeking subtle signs of hidden birds’ nests.

The first large fungus I gathered near a birch tree was one of the most poisonous and also one of the most iconic. The red-capped mushroom ‘with white spots’ appears on ceramics, Christmas cards, T-shirts and cakes. When a gnome needs a seat this mushroom provides it. When Wiffly-Piffly Bunny goes to visit his friend Mrs Mouse she lives in one of these mushrooms, with little windows opening up in the cap, like attic dormers. I suppose it is an icon of sorts, if only on account of its unmistakable signature. Its common name is fly agaric, and its scientific one Amanita muscaria, and for once the latter name has remained inviolate. Finding it was a wonderful moment for the young mycologist. It was difficult to believe that any natural colour could be so brilliant, as if some sprite of the woods had come in the night with a magic paint pot to colour it up. I checked with my little book to learn that the ‘spots’ can actually be wiped off the scarlet cap – they are removable scabs rather than part of the cap itself. They start as part of a white ‘bag’ that encases the whole toadstool, and as it grows to scarlet splendour the bag splits into fragments, a few of which remain to decorate the surface. I checked that there was a collar, or ring, on the stem, and that the gills were white. One example went into the basket.

Onwards, down the track to see pale brown, funnel-shaped mushrooms that when picked spilt white milky juice on my fingers. There were only a few mushrooms that had this property, and a search through the Observer’s Book found the name Lactarius, with a milky name to suit. From woody twigs arose little delicate bunches of mushrooms with conical caps, almost too fragile to pick. Their stems were no wider than a knitting needle: I took one home for a more leisurely examination. A log on its side seemed to erupt with stacks of tiny brackets, striped concentrically like decorated awnings. There were fungi everywhere! Under a beech tree, scarlet brittle gills (Russula) had caps almost as bright as the fly agaric’s, a troop of mushrooms crouched close to the ground like lurid cakes that had popped out of the soil. The one I examined had white gills, and had no ring on its stem, which was about the same size and colour as a stick of blackboard chalk, and snapped as suddenly when it was broken. A very pale yellowish fungus sprouted from the path side, which had a similar stature to the fly agaric, and seemed to show comparable features of the gills and stem. Another Amanita – the false death cap. It was supposed to smell like cut potatoes, and yes, that seemed to be the exact analogy. The next page in my book showed an illustration of the true death cap (Amanita phalloides), the most lethal toadstool known to man, its cap a sinister green colour. Elsie Wakefield said it was to be avoided at all costs. It must have an entry in The Guinness Book of Records. I found mushrooms with chocolate-brown gills and rust-coloured gills, and even one with deep pink gills. They must surely all be different species. My basket was getting full quite quickly, but there seemed no end to the variety. On the ground what looked like a mass of discarded orange peel proved to be yet another kind of fungus, but this one could never be called a toadstool. What name to give it? Then hidden in the beech litter a troop of something entirely black covered a yard or so of the forest floor. The fungi were dark and flaccid funnels a couple of inches high blanketing the ground. They were from another reality, and surely wore the livery of the Underworld, malevolent and unnatural, like an eldrich vegetable from an H. P. Lovecraft story (I had just learned that word ‘eldrich’). It was easy to find in the Observer’s Book, for nothing else resembled it: Craterellus cornucopioides. I thought a cornucopia was a horn bursting with good things, and ‘horn of plenty’ was one of the fungus’s common names, but I think I preferred the French ‘trompette de mort’ (trumpet of death) as more appropriate to its sombre colours and alien form. I had to take some of these fungi home to scare the family. To my surprise, they were described as ‘edible and good’ in the little book.

I doubt whether many parents would now allow a pubescent boy to foray alone through dense woods on the outskirts of London. It is the kind of place where madmen dig their shallow graves. It may be a site for clandestine appointments. It would be strangely appropriate if drugs were traded next to the trompettes de mort. My parents were not particularly lax. At least, I did get the advice never to talk to strangers. To those who had survived the Blitz I suspect all other dangers shrank in proportion. Let the children run free! I cannot remember being afraid of more than getting lost along the rides. I certainly was not afraid of the fungi, but others were. On my way home on the top of the bus an old gentleman wearing a flat cap eyed the basket on my lap. ‘Don’t touch any of them toadstools, son,’ he said in a serious voice, ‘or you’ll be going to an early grave.’ I looked at him with equal seriousness. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘this is Craterellus cornucopioides.’ I pointed at the red cap pointing out of the basket. ‘The poisonous one is the fly agaric.’ I doubt he believed me.

Once I was back in Ainsdale Road I spread out my finds and tried to identify the mushrooms that I had not had time to name in the woods. It was my first attempt to learn the cast of characters in a play that I had yet fully to understand. Fungi were neither animals nor plants, they were a kingdom all of their own. No wonder they exhibited so many colours and shapes. What I had collected were just the fruit bodies of the fungi, their means of reproduction when they shed their spores, which were far too small to see with the naked eye. I could imagine a brown smear from the gills of a dark mushroom must have been made of thousands of minute spores. I needed Mr Morley-Jones’s microscope to see them properly, as they measured just a few thousandths of a millimetre. Spores were like minute seeds that blew in the wind until they landed in exactly the right place to germinate. The business part of the fungus was a mass of white threads that sometimes adhered to the bottom of the stem – this was the spawn (mycelium) that spread through leaves and wood feeding on the substances that plants – real plants – had synthesised while they prospered in the sunlight. Fungi were recyclers, cleaners, or occasionally unwelcome guests. As I moved between the illustrations in the Observer’s Book I began to realise that I had collected some things that were not in the book. If they were the right colour the gills were attached in a different way, or the mushrooms bruised red when they were handled, of which there was no mention by the thorough Elsie M. Wakefield, or they gave off an exotic smell. There must be many more mushrooms out there to be identified. I realised I was just at the beginning of a long journey.

My mother left me alone to get on with it, because the television was showing the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, doing something important. Although she regarded herself as unconventional, my mother did like her politicians to be good-looking men with neat moustaches. Her liking for Sir Anthony Eden (Macmillan’s predecessor) was based almost entirely on his impeccable manners and his moustache. She preferred Tories, naturally, on account of their better grooming. Following her example, when I was very young I liked the look of Joseph Stalin, who not only had a good moustache but was kind to little children like myself. I could see him beaming at them on the television. I thought he would make a much better ‘uncle’ than Eddie and Arthur, serving in the shops in Fulham and Willesden. My mother failed to warm to Labour politicians, not, probably, because she differed strongly on principle, but because they were deficient in the manners and moustache department. When Michael Foot (Labour) appeared on the box or on the radio she would describe the politician acidly as a ‘whippersnapper’. My sister was also not enamoured with fungi at first, as her ponies and our beloved Shetland sheepdog Berry (successor to Sue the fox terrier) occupied much of her time. Much later Kath became rather skilled at finding ceps, king of the edible mushrooms, and a kind of unofficial competition has been running between us ever since. My father was away with rod and line.

What I loved about identifying mushrooms was the involvement of nearly all my senses: sight, smell, touch and taste. The first principles had been established by pioneering nineteenth-century scientists, before the microscope had become indispensable, so the young mycologist was treading in the same footsteps as his naturalist ancestors. Sight was involved, obviously, as I had to check not just the colour of the cap, but more importantly that of the gills, and stem. The gills were attached to the stem in various ways, sometimes running down it, or curving upwards, maybe not even reaching as far as the stem itself. Some mushrooms had a ‘ring’ on the stem – like the fly agaric – others did not. To find the colour of the spores meant taking a spore print – placing a cut cap gills down on a sheet of paper and covering it with a glass overnight to see what spore deposit had been thrown down by the morning. White was common, but I soon discovered various shades of brown, and pink, or purplish- to jet-black. Some mushrooms changed colour when the flesh was damaged. I soon learned to recognise the blusher (Amanita rubescens), a common relative of the fly agaric that flushed pink when its stem was rubbed. Other mushrooms bruised yellow or even black. Touch: some mushrooms felt silky smooth ‘like a kid glove’ (Clitopilus prunulus), others were subtly rough like shagreen. Taste was important: some fungi had no taste at all while others were distinctive. A taste resembling what E. M. Wakefield called ‘new meal’ was characteristic of some varieties, like the white St George’s mushroom, which separated it out from a number of similar-looking species by its overwhelming smell and taste of newly baked bread. Some of the brittlegills (Russula) were peppery to taste, or hot, or simply unpleasant. The rule was to nibble a little bit on the tip of the tongue and spit it out when the taste cut in. The latex that dripped from the milkcaps (Lactarius) when their gills were broken could be mild, or practically blow your head off. I used to place a drop on my little finger and test it on the tongue. Even this was sometimes an ordeal. I soon learned that superficially similar mushrooms could have dissimilar tastes. The mycological world was complex and I was finding my way through it by experiment, mushroom by mushroom. As for smell, it was the most difficult of all. Odour can only be described by reference to something else: smells like frying bacon, honey, or blue cheese. Only a few are beyond question. The sulphur knight (Tricholoma sulphureum) smells of coal tar – it is exactly like freshly laid tarmacadam. Everyone knows aniseed, and a few mushrooms exude a strong odour of ouzo. One of them is also helpfully green in colour (Clitocybe odora) – a gentle blue-green, and not the evil green of the death cap. The curious fragrance of freshly cut new potatoes may be subtler, but most people recognise it when it is pointed out, as I did in Ruislip Woods with the false death cap. The scent of radish is common enough in the fungal world, but some people think it is rather more like that of cucumber. Some Inocybe species are reputed to smell of sperm. I soon discovered two particularly charming examples. One was the aroma given off by a rather small whitish mushroom that grows in short grass (Hygrocybe russocoriacea). Elsie Wakefield said it smelled of Russian leather. What could that be like? I could scarcely go round a leather shop sniffing at articles on sale until I found the right one. Only when I finally, and independently identified the mushroom did I know what Russian leather actually smelled like. The mushroom helped me identify the smell rather than the other way round. I have never met a Russian wearing leather to confirm my diagnosis. My favourite aroma of all was a mushroom that was described as smelling of damp chicken feathers (Singerocybe phaeophthalma). I have never managed to verify this by catching a chicken and dousing it with water.

Another book helped me to the science. The seventh in Collins’ New Naturalist series dealt with fungi. During the 1950s the series was a real trailblazer. The writers were not merely expert, they were often world leaders in research. The book covers have become classics, a blend of the semi-abstract and the specific that has real style. Nikko Tinbergen was the father of ethology – if one excludes Darwin, who inevitably got there first – and The Herring Gull was ninth in the series; fourth was L. Dudley Stamp on Britain’s Structure and Scenery, which was one ancestor of my own book The Hidden Landscape. Mushrooms and Toadstools by John Ramsbottom was for a year or two my bible. Its combination of history, learning, anecdote and science had me enthralled. I still have my old copy, the dust cover long decayed, the binding coming loose through decades of use.[2] The book helped me understand the many different kinds of fungi. Puffballs and regular mushrooms were distant cousins, I learned, and there were wonderful things called earthstars for me to discover that looked like fungi crossed with starfish. That ‘orange peel’ I collected in Ruislip Woods belonged to another group of fungi altogether that bore their spores in flasks (asci – hence the Ascomycetes) rather than exposed to the air on special cells (basidia, hence Basidiomycetes) as in regular mushrooms. A whole chapter dealt with the mycological equivalent of ethyl isocyanide – the stinkhorn, the smelliest fungus known to man. The stench of rotting flesh that emanated from its dripping gleba attracted flies that helped disperse its spores; its Latin name (Phallus impudicus) was a perfect anatomical description of its shape (at that time I would have described it as rude). It seemed to me that fungi could resemble almost anything, so long as it was bizarre. I followed every word of Ramsbottom’s grisly account of the effects of poisoning by death cap (Amanita phalloides): how the victim would recover for a while after a lethal meal only to be plunged into further agonies as the toxin destroyed his or her internal organs. This was the end envisaged for me by the man on the bus back from Ruislip Woods. Within a couple of years I found a death cap for myself – it was hiding among the beech mast and I did not dare touch it. The heart of Ramsbottom’s book was a huge list of fungi associated with different habitats that showed me just how many varieties there were that were not in my Observer’s Book. Several kinds of grasslands, woodlands and fens each had their own special species. It was a challenge thrown down for my future investigations. While I encountered so much that was new I also built up an image of the writer: learned, but with a light touch, kindly, broadly cultured, and literate. Maybe he was like the professor I had imagined identifying my first ammonite in the Natural History Museum. John Ramsbottom had been its Keeper of Botany at a time when fungi and plants were classified together. They are now separate kingdoms; their DNA tells us so.

As for food, I supplied my family with unfamiliar mushrooms, and they ate them. It could be said that eating is the ultimate test of taxonomy, the proof that you are willing to put your money (or mushroom) where your mouth is. I now know enough about fungi to understand that I was really lucky not to have made any mistakes. There are pitfalls that do not appear in The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi. I might have unwittingly followed Graham Young the ‘teacup poisoner’ in using my family as experimental material to observe the effects of alkaloid poisoning. There are some deadly toadstools that are normally rare – and hence missed out of any book on common finds. But occasionally they have a ‘good year’ and appear in several localities. One of the scarlet webcaps (Cortinarius) has caused several severe cases of mushroom poisoning, notably in 2008 the family of Nicholas Evans, writer of The Horse Whisperer. The guilty mushroom was unusually abundant in Scotland that year, and was presumably mistaken for the excellent edible chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius), which has a similar bright orange colour. Three of Evans’ family had to have kidney dialysis; Evans himself eventually received one of his daughter’s kidneys three years later. The mushroom that causes more stomach ache and vomiting (but not death) than any other looks very like the familiar ‘shop mushroom’. It belongs to the same genus, Agaricus, typically with a white cap with black gills and a ring on the stem. Its close relative the field mushroom, Agaricus campestris, is the only mushroom picked by a typical forager. Its poisonous and deceptive relation is called the yellow staining mushroom (Agaricus xanthodermus, ‘yellow skin’ in Greek). Even now I will rush excitedly towards a patch of promising white mushrooms only to find that they are this dangerous lookalike, the disagreeable doppelgänger. It does, of course, have a distinctive smell, which is difficult to characterise other than that it is not ‘mushroomy’. It is the chemical phenol, which was present in the writing ink we used before the ballpoint pen was invented, and the inkwell became redundant. The identity of the white fraudster is best revealed if the base of its stem is scratched, where the flesh turns canary yellow in a trice. The same often happens with the edge of the cap. Fortunately, this was one trick I learned early on. My neighbour was not so fortunate: he appeared at my door ashen-faced last year. ‘What have I eaten?’ he asked, holding out a plastic bag with a few mushrooms lying in the bottom. ‘I’ve been sick all night.’ The yellow staining mushroom had claimed another victim.

There are relatively few very poisonous toadstools, but many more that are not worth eating – too small, tough, tasteless or vaguely nasty. The Observer’s Book identified some of the best and safest edible species and these were the ones that found their way on to the family table. Boletes were the easiest to recognise because in this family normal fungus gills were replaced by masses of narrow tubes, giving the underside of the cap a spongy look. There were very few that had to be avoided, and all of these uncommon. The penny bun (Boletus edulis) was the most sought after of its kind, as it is everywhere in Europe, where it is variously known as porcini, cep, Steinpilz, or Karl Johan’s sopp, all of which are synonyms of ‘delicious’. It is chunky, and from a distance the cap does indeed looked like a freshly baked old-fashioned bun, its only drawback being that maggots find it as tasty as we do. When you beat them to it, you are treated to a nutty, almost meaty, gastronomic delicacy. The Russians slice them and dry them, and open their jars of dried porcini to inhale the smell to drive away the blues brought on by their endless winters. Parasol mushrooms (Macrolepiota) were bigger and more statuesque than anything else, and could be spotted from a speeding car, growing out of rough sward; I would insist on my parents stopping long enough for me to gather the prize. Even the white giant puffball could be sliced and fried in butter when it was young. I was walking in the beech woods near Woodspeen Farm when I discovered my first pure gold: chanterelles. There was a troop of them in a leaf-filled ditch, and they were shining like jewellery: golden yellow funnel-shaped mushrooms variously lobed and pleated, some growing from mounds of moss like baubles presented on velvet cushions. I gathered them joyfully. They smelled of apricots: the Kingdom of the Fungi can always spring a surprise.

And here is another: truffles are fungi that grow to maturity underground. There are numerous species that have evolved this habit, many of them small, roundish and knobbly; few of them are of culinary interest. However, the Italian white truffle (Tuber magnatum) is famous for being the most expensive food in the world, outstripping Beluga caviar weight for weight. The aroma of this truffle is a confection of all the most delicious chemicals that can set the salivary glands to work. The black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) grows in the south of France and is hardly less delicious; it was formerly so abundant that special trains loaded with them were sent to Paris before the truffle’s incomparable odour could fade. The summer or English truffle (Tuber aestivum) is not quite in the same class, but it is good enough to have once employed truffle hunters on some of our great estates. Truffles rely on animals with a sharp sense of smell, like wild pigs, to grub them up and spread their spores in their droppings. They are a challenge to find, and those who make their livelihood from truffles use trained dogs to sniff them out. I saw some sorry little dogs in Corsica at their work – they had to be kept hungry to perform, and I was tempted to slip them a few biscuits while nobody was looking. John Ramsbottom mentioned that there were special flies whose larvae gorged on truffles; they, too, can detect their special aroma. The crowning triumph of my youthful forays was discovering my own summer truffle in Savernake Forest, just east of Marlborough. Fine avenues of beech trees divide this ancient woodland. In a clearing I noticed flies dancing over a particular patch of leaf litter – they might be truffle flies (Suillia) showing me the site of buried treasure. I dug down, and about six inches below the surface of the ground I found what I had hoped for. In my hand the truffle was about the size and colour of a grenade, all warty on the outside, not a thing of beauty, but to me the most exciting find of my mushrooming year.

I have stayed loyal to both fungi and fossils. The latter became my livelihood, while the former have remained my hobby. It could well have been the other way round.

My mycological knowledge increased in proportion to the books I had available. After Ramsbottom’s New Naturalist came the Collins field guide, abstracted by F. Bayard Hora of Reading University from a great and beautiful 1935–40 publication in several volumes by J. E. Lange on the fungi of Denmark. My well-thumbed old copy of this Collins guide testifies to the use it enjoyed for many years – it more than doubled the species I could recognise in the field. It was carried in my jacket pocket, and more than once dropped into a puddle (I carefully dabbed the pages dry as if the pictures were by J. M. W. Turner). Lange had followed a tradition of fungal illustration, using watercolour drawings to illustrate the nuances that separated species. He had a knack for encapsulating just the important features that helped the identifier make a decision. F. B. Hora led forays near my home town in which he sent everyone off into the woods to seek interesting mushrooms. Then he would produce a cacophonous blast on a hunting horn to summon his forayers back to base, so that he could deliver judgement on their finds. In 1981 Roger Phillips produced the famous Pan Original Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Britain and Europe. This was the first time photographs successfully competed with a tradition of watercolours going back to the eighteenth century. Even Beatrix Potter took time off from Peter Rabbit to add some exquisite examples to that genre. Phillips’ book described more than 900 species of fungi, using truly excellent photographs. At the time it seemed to be the last word – but of course there is never a last word.

My own interest fluctuated. I never missed a year without going on forays, but while I was establishing my academic career as a palaeontologist my knowledge of fungi ticked over gently. My interest reawakened with the autumn rains, when the basket was disinterred, and gratifying forays through woods began again. I loved introducing wildlife groups to the charm of toadstools. The arguments about smells came up with every new season. There was always somebody who would challenge whether the aroma of the false death cap (Amanita citrina) was really like cut potatoes, while others would insist that it could hardly be anything else. Nobody disputed that stinkhorns were stinky. There was often an irritating forayer who would ask no question other than ‘Can you eat it?’ while I was explaining how the gills attach to the stem, or eloquently explaining the function of spore dispersal. I have been known to silence these individuals by inviting them to taste a few drops from a particularly fiery milk mushroom. When I lived in London my local forays were often around West Norwood cemetery, a huge nineteenth-century graveyard not far from our house. I would progress with my basket and hand lens around the trees dotted among rather splendid tombs, poking about and finding all manner of small and interesting fruit bodies. One week I discovered from the local newspaper that a series of drug busts had taken place the week before – the cemetery had apparently been bristling with heroin and cocaine as well as agarics. I imagined what the pushers would have made of my pretence of being a harmless fungus gatherer. It might have been as dangerous as eating a death cap.

Throughout these middle years I was merely revising my knowledge annually when the mushroom ‘season’ began, recycling what I had learned from Roger Phillips and his predecessors. I was doing just what a nineteenth-century ‘botanising’ parson might have done. Thirty years ago I decided that I must learn microscopy, and I started to become a modern mycologist. My hand lens was replaced by oil immersion. I looked at spores close up, and at the cellular structure of the edge of the fungus gills. It changed the process of identification, and opened up a new level of accuracy. I could now explore different kinds of fungi: tiny ones that erupted on horse manure; white patches on the underside of logs; even fungi that grew on other fungi. I learned the deficiencies of all my previous books and bought more. In the process I lost something of the innocent pleasure of that young boy who discovered his first chanterelles, or the simple delight of the slightly older one who dug up a summer truffle.

In recent years I have been deprived of my sense of smell. I cannot help wondering whether it is a punishment from the gods for my youthful misuse of the smelliest substance known to man. I can no longer detect Russian leather. I still lead fungus forays but now I have to appoint an ‘official nose’ before I start. I might choose someone with a resemblance to Cyrano de Bergerac, or if Cyrano has not turned up I find young women are often superior in the nose department. ‘Does it smell of wet chicken feathers?’ I will ask. ‘Oh, absolutely!’ comes the reply. Occasionally, I have an independent-minded official nose who disagrees with everything I say. ‘Cut new potatoes,’ I will announce, holding up a false death cap. ‘Nonsense!’ the rebel will respond. ‘It smells of umbrellas!’ There is nothing to do in these circumstances but to hold a referendum on the smell, and then head with the group onwards into the forest in the hope of finding a stinkhorn.

*    *    *

Chemistry and fossils integrated seamlessly into my progress at Ealing Grammar School for Boys, but I kept the mushrooms to myself. They were my esoteric secret. This was as far away from team games as could be imagined. I was a team of one, rewarding my own curiosity with my own prizes. I never studied biology at school. I thought I could do it all myself, and that it would kill some of the fun I had if it were a ‘subject’. I studied almost everything else. As I went upwards through the school system it became clear that I was an all-rounder, which was not a particularly good thing to be (except for getting marks). One or two of my contemporaries were gifted linguists but no good at mathematics. We had one extraordinarily able musician, and Allen Jones the artist has been mentioned. The paths through life of dedicated linguists, musicians and painters could have been printed in their genes. They don’t have the agony of choice. In our school lifetime there was one fork in the road that it was not possible to avoid. After the Ordinary level examinations were completed A levels and two years of the sixth form came next, and the school divided into an arts and a science sixth. I was unhappy about closing off a whole range of my interests from more school-time exploration. By the time I reached my teens writing had already become important to me, and a growing cultural life ran in parallel with my natural-history enthusiasms. I never recognised the arts/science ‘two cultures’ schism that C. P. Snow had promulgated when I was thirteen years old, but I knew that I would be forced to make a decision, and that the outcome would close off some possibilities for ever. And it was almost true: it took me much of my life to reintegrate myself into the person I was when I was sixteen.

I dithered. I felt pulled both ways. The English master said that he trusted I would be following him into the sixth form. He was quite sure that this was the right way for me to go. I had taken my French O level a year early and afterwards spent a rather superfluous year quietly reading a few French novels in class (while the latecomers swotted) among which Tartarin de Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet sticks in my mind because it was supposed to be funny, and its humour passed me by. I attempted to learn colloquial phrases from our old textbook. Some of them were funnier than Daudet, because they were completely arcane: ‘He always wore a broad-brimmed, black felt hat’ is a phrase I have yet to employ in France or anywhere else. The French for ‘I couldn’t help laughing’ was (I think) ‘Je n’ai pas pu m’empêcher de rire’ – but when I did use it at last in France I earned only a mystified shrug. My French was about fifty years out of date:[3] when asked where I lived I was trained to reply ‘Je demeure en Londres’ which was equivalent to saying ‘I dwell in yonder great city’. A school trip to France was an extraordinary adventure at that time, with terrible old ships that had been around since the Great War that tossed and groaned as they breasted the waves, and swilled with vomit. Matelots with Gauloises hanging on their lips made rude remarks that bore little resemblance to the French I knew. Once on land, the toilets were holes in the ground designed for undignified squatting. I loved it all. I had silly fantasies about being a charismatic Frenchman, rather like Jean-Paul Belmondo, lounge-lizarding on La Rive Gauche. It would be hard to give up. Years later I took up smoking untipped Gitanes because of the swirling gypsy on the packet. I still dream about the decadence of those cigarettes.

On the other hand, I had Mr Williams and geology. I could follow my favourite activities as part of my schoolwork, with the guidance of the best teacher in the school. Mr Williams suggested in his gentle way that he would be happy to welcome me into his small club. I could keep up my art, whatever happened. Even then, the advice for an aspiring scientist was to study physics, chemistry and mathematics. I had done well enough so far to make this a viable choice. I had also taken mathematics early, and to everyone’s surprise I had done well afterwards with an extra O level in something called ‘Further Maths’ completed in one year. Perhaps this was one of my talents. Maybe this was the better way to go?

I needed arbitration. Word of my dilemma must have reached A. Sainsbury-Hicks. I was summoned again to the corridor leading to the staff room. After all, if I made the wrong choice it might diminish his school’s chances of getting that winning number of Oxbridge places. The headmaster strutted out of his private quarters and eyed me, meaningfully. ‘Now, Fortey,’ he barked, ‘I’m going to ask you a direct question and I want a direct answer.’ ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, trying to sound up to the response required. The gaze became more piercing, an awl penetrating my very soul, a skewer spearing the clumsy chunks of my self-doubt, ready for grilling. ‘Are you more interested in people or things?’ said A. Sainsbury-Hicks. I knew I had seconds to make up my mind. My life whizzed past in a few images: trout, birds, chemicals, fossils, mushrooms. ‘Things, sir,’ I replied, without much conviction. ‘Science sixth for you!’ said A. Sainsbury-Hicks. Thus was my future decided in a couple of minutes: the points had been switched, and the track was laid down for me to follow whether I liked it or not.

*    *    *

In the winter of 2006 I went on another of my personal fungus forays. Every weekend during the colder half of the year I find time to make a short walk in the chalk hills around my home town in Oxfordshire. I poke around looking for small things that might be easily overlooked. If there is a mild period, all kinds of subtle fungi decide to produce their fruit bodies and grow spores. A ditch might be just the place to look, or an overgrown hedge bank, or maybe a moss-covered log. The small boy with the Observer’s Book and a basket is now white-haired and with a hand lens dangling around his neck, but it is the same explorer as ever was, curiously probing around to see what might turn up. The winter is a time for cryptic species hiding under bark, little flasks of spores hidden under the skin of dead and dying trees. I can detect them by stroking the surface of bark as would a blind man. The tips of the hidden fruit bodies project slightly, and fingertips are more sensitive than anything else to minute irregularities. These species all need a microscope for identification (they are specialised ascomycetes), and I could not have attempted them before I had my own laboratory. My family refers to them as my ‘things on sticks’, with gentle eye-rolling.

One of my local sites is at the edge of an ancient manor called Grey’s Court, owned by the National Trust; a tiny road called Rocky Lane runs past it. The verges of the road are overgrown and damp – just the place for fungi. I was searching for small species that like to grow on the stout stems of dead burdock, that tall herb whose seeds hook into clothing with such remarkable persistence. I had already found one or two common small fungi when I noticed a conspicuous bright orange patch a few centimetres long, on one side of a particularly large standing stem where it disappeared into the mossy ground. Under my lens I saw at once that the surface of the patch was a mass of small pores, the ends of short tubes that must have been lined with spore-bearing cells. I knew at once it was something unusual. I took the fungus back home carefully and placed part of the sample in an airtight box with some moss to keep it in good condition. The rest of the sample I rested on a glass slide to allow the spores to drop from the tubes, which took an hour or two. The spores made a white spore print, but there was nothing unusual in that. Under the microscope they were colourless, elliptical in shape and only four-thousandths of a millimetre long, and about half as wide. I squashed a sample of the orange fruit body, which proved to be rather soft, and composed of strongly coloured threads (hyphae). I owned a large book about these kinds of fungi, which are known as poroids. The book was supposed to summarise the current state of knowledge of several hundred species, with determinations aided by keys to sort out contending identifications. I could not get my find to fit exactly with any fungus in the book. I needed to dry the samples – over very gentle heat – to preserve them from decay. If this is done properly all the microscopic features are well preserved for future study. I was in correspondence with a helpful mycologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew whose expertise outstripped mine, so off the dried sample went for his scrutiny. He, too, confessed himself baffled. There was, he said, one final recourse. The specimen should be forwarded to the authority on these kinds of fungi, Professor Leif Ryvarden of Oslo University. Breath was bated. Judgement was awaited. At last, I heard from Oslo that the orange patch was, as the jargon has it, a species new to science. That explained why it could not be keyed out in the big book! It seemed extraordinary that it was possible to find a relatively conspicuous new species a mile away from my home in the domestic countryside of the south-east of England: another surprise from the Kingdom of the Fungi. A year later the fungus had a name, Ceriporiopsis herbicola. Its second, species name refers to the fact that it was found on a herbaceous stem rather than on wood, which is usual for other species of Ceriporiopsis. The name became ‘official’ when it was published with a description and drawings in a scientific journal published in Norway in July 2007 – Cerioporiopsis herbicola Fortey and Ryvarden was on record in perpetuity. This is the only fungus to which my name is attached. Over many years, I had coined dozens of scientific names for fossils, but there is something special about naming something that is still alive. Before it gets a name an organism does not properly exist: the name serves to bring it to reality. It becomes an entry in the catalogue of life. It becomes eligible for a biography.

The full mushroom basket.