Hooray
The glorious mushroom season has started as I start to build up for our annual UK Fungus Day event here on Sunday October 9th.
Yesterday I filmed a huge boletus mushroom turn from yellow to blue. I found this lurid bolete Suillelus luridus ( I think it’s called) in the National Botanic Garden of Wales’s Principality House car park. It was attached to the roots of a young lime tree Tilia sp. I’ve only found this impressively large species a couple of times before, both times next to beech. Our volunteer conservation group found some other cool fungi earlier in the week, the hightlight being a hedgehog fungi in the Fairy Woods – have a look at the photo.
All this builds us up nicely for our UK Fungus Day event here on Sunday 9th October. The programme is rapidly coming together but I’m quite excited by a couple of things in particular. I’ve just spoken to Duncan Brown, who is one of the editors of Ffyngau, a new directory of Welsh names for fungi. So, on Fungus Day I’ll be running a walk that will tell our visitors the Welsh names for fungi and I’ll Welsh speakers on hand to help me out.
We’ll also have Kate Jones on hand to talk about the fungi book illustrations of Beatrix Potter. The creator of Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin was a highly skilled mycological illustrator but she lived in male dominated world which prevented her from getting due recognition of her talents. Come and find out more from Kate.
Ray Woods will also be here talking about tree lichens. He’s created what he thinks may well be a world’s first for botanic garden – he’s grafted rare lungwort lichens onto a willow tree here in order to help conserve the species in Wales. Ray will also be in the Garden tomorrow for a training day of the Plantlife-run Wales Lichen Apprentice Scheme, a great project that will be training up the next generation of lichen experts. Luckily, I’ll be joining them and will have my hand lens at the ready for what I hope will be fascinating day.
More on UK Fungus Day to come.