Walking through a woodland you may see an ash tree or beech tree with black blobs on it.  The black blobs are often on dead branches or on branches that have fallen from the tree. These blobs have various names from coal fungus to cramp balls* or King Alfred's cakes. Like so many things in woodlands, once you know to look for these, you might see them quite often. These black lumps are usually hard, semi-spherical and about 3-4 cm in diameter.  They are the fruiting / reproductive bodies of a fungus, which finds a home in the dead wood of the tree.   The scientific name is Daldinia concentrica.  The blobs are pinkish brown colour when first formed but darken with age and may become somewhat shiny. It is said that King Alfred, when in hiding from the Danes, once allow some cakes to burn by failing to take them out of the oven. These fungal bodies, which look as if they have been burned, are a reminder of his inattention and hence are nicknamed “King Alfred’s Cakes”.  The fruiting bodies can be very useful for lighting fires because the inner ‘flesh’, once dried out, can be easily lit from a “firesteel”.  This is an artificial flint which creates a spark for starting fires, much used by ‘bushcraft people’.  A spark or two will ignite the dried flesh of the fungus.  Though this material burns slowly [like a barbecue briquette], once it has been lit one can transfer the glowing part to a ‘ball’ of tinder (for example, dried goosegrass) and get a fire started. [caption id="attachment_15473" align="alignleft" width="300"] Internal concentric rings of the fungus[/caption] Now WoodlandsTV has produced a film about these interesting ‘cakes’ and how to use them to make a fire.  Matt Clarke demonstrates how to start a fire using a small piece of this dry fungus and some dried vegetation. .  This can viewed either here on the woodlands web site or on YouTube :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ulGcEHN-k0.          it was believed that carrying the fungus would protect people from attacks of cramp.

The honey bee, Apis mellifera, stores food in the form of bee bread. Bee bread is formed through the fermentation of a mixture of pollen, nectar and bee saliva.   It is 'inoculated' with a range of bacteria and yeasts that ferment the material after storage in the comb cells of a hive.  Bee bread is the chief protein resource for bees, particularly for the feeding of larvae [and adults].  As it is a nutrient-rich material, it ‘supports’ various microorganisms, despite its acidic nature and low water content. Bee bread is also coated with propolis.  Propolis (sometimes called ‘bee glue’) is a resinous substance collected by bees from tree bark and leaf buds. This resin is ‘chewed’, mixed with salivary enzymes and the partially digested material is mixed with beeswax.  It is an antimicrobial substance.  It is used by bees to seal holes in their honeycombs and help in the construction of the hive. The very nature of bee bread and the coating of propolis create a ‘challenging environment’ for microbes to grow and survive.   However, despite the ‘unwelcoming’ nature of bee bread, several species of fungi and bacteria form a microbiome within a hive, and are thought to play an rôle in the life of the bees. Recent studies have revealed that the fungus Aspergillus flavus is well adapted to survive in bee colonies.  A strain extracted from a hive was found not only tolerate low pH (which other strains of the fungus could not cope with) but could also deal with the low water content of bee bread, and with the propolis - which is thought to have anti-fungal properties.  Further work demonstrated that this strain of the fungus had mutations that allowed it to develop within the ‘bee bread environment’.  That this fungus can live with the bees suggests that there might be some form of mutual benefit to both fungus and bee, but the relationship (if there is one) is not as yet understood. Full details of this study can be found here  

Weather-wise, it’s been a bit all over the place this Summer. However, the hotter spells punctuated by heavy downpours that characterise July, along with the dense leaf canopy of our broadleaf woodland areas at this time of year, have resulted in an at times oppressive humidity that seems particularly conducive to the first blooms of our more familiar cap-and-stem types of mushrooms and toadstools, marking a turning point that will take us within a couple of months to a period where our wooded areas will soon be flooded with fungi. Annoyingly, the summer months similarly see our woodlands buzzing with all manner of flying and biting insects, making it less tempting to head out and find and photograph the species more prevalent in this early period of mycological bounty! Read more...

There are many reasons why resupinate or crust fungi fail to attract much in the way of love or attention even among fungi fanatics. For starters, there are hundreds of different types, and the vast bulk of them are incredibly difficult to identify, lacking that one significant feature amongst other identifying criteria such as colour and habitat: a three-dimensional form. They instead appear as flat blotches, skins or coatings of various hues and textures, and mainly on dead standing or fallen trunks and branches, sometimes parasitizing living wood. Read more...

Brackets, crusts and jellies are the most commonly found fungi in the winter months, as I mentioned in my last post on the various species referred to as Witches’ Butter. These categories are essentially descriptive ones, however, aimed at helping one negotiate ones way to the correct pages in general field guides, rather than relating to particular family groupings and relationships based on more scientific principles. One might find countless instances where the dividing line between a particular specimen is not particularly clear. Crusts, or resupinate fungi, often grow as brackets, for example, if the fallen trunk or log they are growing from them is oriented in a particular direction, and a good number possess fruitbodies with a gelatinous texture. Read more...

There are some who argue that the prime fungi hunting season basically comes to an end with the first frosts around November time. There is still plenty to see on those wintry woodland walks around the turn of the year however. In these mid to late winter months, the more conventional cap-and-stem types might be thinner on the ground, but if you care to cast your eyes around to more woody substrates, you should be sure to find a variety of crusts, brackets, tiny ascomycetes and, the subject of this month’s fungi focus, jellies.  Examples of fungi that form soft and gelatinous fruitbodies include the blobby types like Orange Jelly Spot (Dacrymyces stillatus) and Crystal Brain (Exidia nucleata) to more complex and distinctive fruiting forms like the branching Yellow Stagshorn (Calocera viscosa) and the subject of a former post, the Jelly Ear (Auricularia auricula-judae).  Read more...

For well over half of the year, I rather struggle to come up with a suitable subject for these monthly mushroom blog posts. As we now, however, find ourselves at the peak of the season, the explosion of suitably fetching candidates that have appeared over the past 4-6 weeks alone has left me wondering where to place my focus this time.   The past October seems to have presented a particular abundance, even by usual standards for the time of year, if the various specialist fungi spotting and forager forums and social media sites have been anything to go by, with many seasonal species popping up simultaneously across the country. “It is always around the 15th October that, seemingly out of nowhere, the honey fungus suddenly appears in the woods.”, the BBC Woman’s Hour website claims and sure enough, it was on this exact date but a few weeks back that I popped down to my local park and found the specimens snapped for this recent Woodlands  posting. Read more...

It should be pretty easy, one would think, to recognise the various species within the Russula genus, or brittlegills, the bright-coloured little mushrooms that have been popping up vigorously across the country over the past few months. Their vibrant cap colours render them immediately conspicuous among the Autumn leaf litter surrounding the bases of the trees with which they form mycorrhizal relationships. while their shared features make them relatively easy to situate within this wide grouping. All are particularly prone to crumbling and breaking under rough handling and all have white or slightly off-white stems, gills and flesh, often exposed beneath the holes left in their vivid cap cuticles by snacking woodland creatures. Read more...