A shroom with a view

Excuse me for getting a bit mushroom-centric in these posts, but right now it seems to be one of the few things that I can grow successfully. Or, to be more accurate, something that appears in my garden successfully without any kind of intervention from the resident gardener.

Last weekend I was about to attempt the final cut – not a recreation of the 1983 album by Pink Floyd, but the last outing for the geriatric lawnmower that is on the point of being sent off to the knackers’ yard.

As any readers of the eponymous Handbook will appreciate, procrastination is a deft skill exercised by the grumpy gardener. Surveying the lawn I spied a couple of interesting varieties of mushroom that surely deserved a little longer to reach maturity and spread their spores. I would be interfering in the complex ecology of the climatic climax community if I mowed them to a pulp right now.

It was damp too – I know, not a real shocker at this time of year, but not a great way for the mower to pay its final curtain call.

If I’d been demurring a little, further progress down the garden convinced me that for sound ecological reasons mowing was out of the question. I had nine varieties of mushrooms on the lawn – that’s eight more than the number of fritillaries I successfully raised this Spring. (But 16 less than the number of fritillaries that Parkers Bulbs said they would replace and didn’t.)

Amongst my National Collection of Mushrooms was actually one I could identity – the common puffball. I’d always thought that puffballs were like large white deflated footballs, but these gave themselves away by their volcanic action of emitting a cloud of brown spores from the rupture point on their domes. The one shown below has blown.

Macro-photography of their surface shows what beautiful things they really are. Added to that is the magic of their sudden appearance, and equally rapid disappearance. It’s like that famous James Blunt song isn’t it. He obviously based it on a puffball in his back garden not a woman he saw passing on an escalator.

They’re not all so pretty. There was one (below) that looked like the unwanted and unwashed relation that turns up unexpectedly at Christmas. It is probably a gourmet treat and gourmands will pay £10 a gram for a slice of its heavenly taste – after all, truffles look a bit like tubers – but it looks exactly the kind of mushroom that could wipe out an entire village when added to the communal stew at the Christmas fete.

Despite its lack of pulchritude I am happy for it to live out is life cycle, as I am all the others. Soon it will be frosty and they’ll be gone. And I can always mow in the spring.