Fungi

My April garden is filled with colour - golds and reds on tree leaves, beautiful blue asters, pink late blooming roses. This year I fancied something different - so I went in search of the most colourful fungi I could find.

Each Autumn I duck under the Dogwoods and overbalance into the Oak trees, camera wobbling, close-up button switched on. Autumn is usually a time for looking up to the sky, not looking down on the lawns and the garden floor.

The Moosey Garden Fungi Collection has two main members. They are not to be eaten, and will not be properly named. Each Autumn the dull gold-browns appear in the grass above the buried tree stumps. It always looks as if someone has thrown out stale scones and pikelets for the birds.

Traditional Toadstools

My red spotties are the traditional toadstools, delightfully erratic, and random, too - here one year, there another. In a gardening sense I can definitely relate to that!

I can't look at a red spotty toadstool without thinking of childrens' drawings of fairies and other little garden people. Every self respecting garden gnome deserves a red-spotty toadstool garden seat, too - pity my poor chap, doomed to be left standing, stuck in the rockery.

Since my own fungi knowledge is sadly small, a little research seems sensible. Alas - I can find little definitive literature, athough there is a Fungi Photographers' Club in the North Island. 'Although over 6000 species are known from New Zealand, it is estimated that another 14,000 remain to be found and described.' I obviously need to bend a little lower, and look a little closer!