Mushroom, mushroom

Last week Zeal­and­ia pub­lished a glor­i­ous little photo-essay An Enchant­ment of Fungi, alert­ing us to the fact that after a long dry sum­mer, the recent rains have brought forth a rich crop of fungal fruit­ing bod­ies.

I went for a walk there last Fri­day and found plenty of vari­ety amid the damp forest, espe­cially on the Val­ley View and Swamp tracks. The pro­lif­er­a­tion of Sticky Bun boletes and the angry red caps of Aman­itas make them hard to miss, but some of the more fas­cin­at­ing spe­cies are minus­cule and del­ic­ate, requir­ing a keen eye to detect them among the drip­ping mosses and ferns.

If you’d rather not spend $18.50 to look at some mush­rooms, there are plenty of oth­er places to look. Myco­lo­gist Geoff Rid­ley (who assisted Zeal­and­i­a’s Hay­ley May with iden­ti­fic­a­tion advice for her photo-essay) has a blog rich with field notes from Otari-Wilton’s bush, the Botan­ic Gar­dens, Bolton St cemetery and else­where. Hay­ley also linked to a use­ful iden­ti­fic­a­tion guide on T.E.R.R.A.I.N., though myco­lo­gic­al tax­onomy is notori­ously tricky, so I would­n’t rely on that for culin­ary or (ahem) oth­er recre­ation­al iden­ti­fic­a­tion pur­poses.