Little Rotters!

What a title for a talk! When I saw this advertised in the programme of the Gardening Club I knew I had to pop along and see what it was all about. Turns out to be a playdate with fungi.


This lovely lady is Sue Shanks (whom I work with on an occassionaly basis - ecologist by training and now an environmental educator. We both work at a Wildlife centre)

 And she bought with her loads of different mushrooms - the fruiting bodies of fungi. These are Fly Agaric - the most common for fairy tales and pretty cards. They are also hallucinogenic and make Reindeer high as a kite when they eat them - hence the stories of flying reindeer.

 Once we had been given the basic identification skills (well as much as you can in 20 minutes) we got to work with the speicimens.  The underside gills are just beautiful to me and the part I was fascinated by in the Fascinating Fungi workhshops.

This one was a bit ripe and stinky! We even had a free maggot. The spine was very knobbly too.

Sue showed us spore prints - you take them by removing the stalk and lying the mushroom cap gill side down on a piece of paper. Leave it overnight in a warm room and this is what you get. I have just got to try this out for myself. I can feel myself itching to stitch this.

With white spores it pays to use a coloured paper.

This one had tubes instead of gills - giving it a very spongey texture. The bottom smelt like earth but the top smelt of cats pee.  Apparently smell is a key diagnostic feature.....Hummmmm

After a while it looked like mushroom carnage!

The pink veining round the top of this one was very pretty. Its quite a chunky little thing.

The milk caps - if you damage the gills they produce milk - orange milk in this case. I thought the caps were just pretty in themselves. My fascination with gills again.

Lots of the samples came complete with soil, twigs, moss etc. They were mini works of art in their own right.  Yet another thing added to my "one day" list - to make more 3D mushrooms and make them more realistic.

Who thought so many varieties could be found in a short distance round Wolverhampton? This is just a very small selection of the ones Sue bought.  Events like this spark my creativity and really make me want to get creating- even if I could never compete with Mother Nature.