With the arrival of late September, moody-foggy-vapoury days with little sunlight and lots of moisture everywhere, the nearby forest grew heavy and fruitful with mushrooms. Some of them are edible, a few – incredibly delicious. Some are terrific in how horrible they taste and others are straight poisonous. Whatever their composition is, my eyes feasted upon the many forms and alien colours. Please, enjoy the gallery of the weird and beautiful that emerged from the cold soil.
Mycena sp. are tiny murshrooms that are insanely popular in the forests around my home. The litter the ground with their little umbrellas like coins scattered by some fungus witch. They are bouncy then toughed and generally very fragile and delicate. Mycenas are generally inedible, they taste terrible and some are poisonous. M. pura is said to contain both chemicals harmful to digestive tract and psychoactive ones.
If this really is M. alliaceus, then it also is an edible mushroom. According to a book I have, it has a strong, garlic-like smell and taste. I tried and smashed one of those mushrooms between my fingers, and I’d describe the smell as interesting, rich in fern and a bit garlic-y indeed. I decided not to eat those though – I can’t be sure what species it is. Edible or not, they look like perfect little fairy umbrellas. They are quite tiny and gracilis. They accompany many other mushrooms on photos below.
If this yellow guy on the left is Armillaria, it is a beautiful speciemen of a saprotrophic and parasitic mushroom. Mycelium of those fungi can stretch hundreds of meters. They infect trees’ roots and slowly kill them. Some of those mushrooms are edible after cooking, but they are not very delicious.
Surprisingly grey and smooth in touch, Lactarius blennius is inedible and very spicy in taste. Some sources say it contains poisonous chemicals, so it is not safe to eat. For me he seems very elegant. His graish-bluish-violet colours makes him stand out proud from surrounding dismay of undergrowth greens and ochre.
Unfortunately I can’t recognize this one. I think I might need a bigger mushroom atlas to refer to!
These mushrooms are completely new to me. I’ve never seen them around the house, but possibly because I wasn’t looking down carefully enough. There are more Ramaria mushrooms in my book, but only R. pallida has the distinct ending of each branch: every one ends with two little spikes. Inedible, poisonous, not tasty and surprisingly alien in form!
Puffball mushrooms! Puffings! Puffingtons! When still young, their caps are decorated with elaborate maze-like structures. A true marvel to behold. Some of those are tasty, when the insides of their caps are still fresh and pure white. And when they mature, they become a source of true fun – old and dry, they demand to be puffed and stomped on to release their spores. One of my favorites!
There are so many more mushrooms, and most of them I can’t identify. I’ll leave You with the following gallery of different caps, stipes, colours and shapes.
