Footnotes

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1. Borgo Val di Taro

1 There are other diagnoses. He may have died from a natural seizure of some kind, according to modern medical opinion.

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2. Mushrooms and toadstools

1 Geoffrey Kibby has recently completed his heroic, self-illustrated four-volume account of British mushrooms and toadstools, and it would be hard to beat Thomas Laessoe and Jens Petersen’s Fungi of Temperate Europe (2019), with some 2,800 fungi described with photographs. Beginners still find Roger Phillips’s pioneering Mushrooms (1981) very useful. The 2005 New Naturalist Fungi volume by Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts makes the scientific background thoroughly accessible.

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5. Vampires

1 A species of Favolaschia is now well established in England, yet another example of fungi moving around the planet.

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7. Collaborators

1 Kibby and Tortelli published their splendid summary of British species in 2022: The Genus Cortinarius in Britain, Summerfield Books.

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2 Molecular evidence allowed the ‘beast’ to be divided into ten genera, which will eventually help identifications, but which are currently beyond the remit of the present writer.

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8. Puffers and friends

1 J.C. Zamora et al. in Persoonia, Volume 34.

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10. Stinkers

1 Latin: ‘lewd’.

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11. Parasites

1 Although I have never found it on any agaric other than the Blackening Brittlegill, I should add that there are reports of it growing on other species of Russula and on some species of milkcaps (Lactarius).

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2 I should note that there are many ascos parasitic on other ascos. They can be spotted through a hand lens sitting on top of their host species, but there are too many and they are too small to deal with here.

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12. Morels and allies

1 A similar idea placed Amanita at the apex of agarics, because these large toadstools had both a ring and a volva – another measure of complexity. This notion lingered for some time, even if unacknowledged. For example, Amanita was placed first in J.E. Lange’s magnificent Flora Agaricina Danica (1935).

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2 There are thousands of species of small discos that require microscope work for their identification. A rather wonderful website called Ascofrance reveals a network of dedicated people, mostly amateurs, who are committed to their study and freely share information. It is a model of how natural history can be furthered internationally with the help of computer technology.

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13. Things on sticks

1 For example, one large group of pyrenos has a double, rather than single, wall to the ascus, a feature requiring microscope work to identify.

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2 A number of basidios also have anamorphic alter egos, differing profoundly from the larger fleshy fungi. I do not deal with the more complicated sex lives of smuts and rusts in this book.

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3 The nomenclatural details are somewhat complex. A very similar, native species found on ash is called Hymenoscyphus albidus, which apparently causes no harm to our native trees; ash dieback was briefly known as a newly differentiated species termed Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus. However, the older species name was fraxinea, and that is the name that finally took precedence. Hence Hymenoscyphus fraxineus.

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19. Rotters

1 (C + H + L) – (C + H) = L. The chemistry is much more complicated than that simple representation. While fungal degradation is often mediated by special enzymes, the brown rotters employ another method to cut cellulose down to size. Fenton’s Reaction produces highly reactive hydroxyl (OH) free radicals that degrade the unwieldy cellulose molecule in a highly efficient way. The fungus then builds its own carbon compounds from its plunder. Even the lignin is not entirely unaffected by the red rotting process, but survives in somewhat modified forms, the chemistry of which is very complex, and still under investigation.

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2 I must mention one asco that is very common in beech wood, the Brittle Cinder Fungus (Kretzschmaria deusta), which fruits as black, tar-like patches on the base of trees, and can be a pathogen.

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20. Mind blowers

1 They were originally presented as anthropological reports, which may be why they achieved such traction, but it soon became clear that the imagination was at work more than the notebook. There are curious echoes of the work of Lobsang Rampa (aka Cyril Hoskin, b. Plymouth, UK) who adopted the persona of a Buddhist mage in his wildly successful book The Third Eye (1956). Even though he was revealed as a fraud, there remains a strong desire among many readers to believe in ancient mystical wisdom, whether it hails from Tibet or Mexico.

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21. Feeders

1 Dipterists study the vast range of insects (Diptera) with only two wings (as opposed to the four-winged species) that include flies of all shapes and sizes, mosquitos, gnats, midges and many more.

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22. Puzzles

1 I still like ‘foray’ to describe what we do, and have used it throughout. Sensitivity over possible confusion with ‘forage’ has led some mushroom groups to simply describe their activities as ‘walks’.

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