This is fly agaric, a mycorrhizal fungus, Amanita muscaria, which is found in the reserve every year despite our lack of its preferred partners: birch and pine trees. In classic pictures of this red and white fungus, those that don’t have an elf sitting on top are usually growing picturesquely in the moss under a birch tree.
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Clive Knight’s yearly search among the reserve’s fungi has turned up fly agaric, the classic spotted toadstool from our fairy tales. Here is a gallery of some of the pictures of Amanita muscaria we have been sent over the years.
Header image by Clive Knight
None of these species of fungus are local, in fact they all come from the other side of the planet. But this is such stunning time-lapse photography by Australian Stephen Axford that we felt you should see it.
Header image by our own wildlife photographer Simon Knight.
Symbiotic fungi explained by David Attenborough.
Header image taken in the reserve by DKG
A tiny candlesnuff fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon, growing in the rotting wood and moss of the old willow tree (number 5477 ) by the footpath alongside the Lambrok Tributary.
Continue reading “Candlesnuff fungus”
by David Feather
I enjoy mushrooms, particularly as part of a full English breakfast. What I have never, till now, known, is that they and their other fungi relatives could save the planet.
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by Clive Knight
by Clive Knight
This is a sequence of pictures of a Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) taken every day from last Friday, the 22nd, up until today, Tuesday 26th. The last picture shows the fungus fully developed at approximately 17cm across, but collapsed. I have found that when they are fully open they do not last long so I am keeping my eye on some more in the reserve hopefully to take pictures of one fully open and still upright.
The header picture is the first in this series, taken by Clive Knight on Friday 22nd October.
One of several fairy rings in Lambrok Meadow, caused by the mycelium of a subterranean fungus.
Continue reading “Fairy rings”
This post was first published in January 2019
Auricularia auricula-judae is one of the few fungi that produces fruiting bodies all year round. Winter hardly seems to trouble it and we found these specimens in the strip of wood between Lambrok Meadow and Kestrel Field, in the second week of January with the early sunshine just beginning to melt the frost that had covered them overnight.
Continue reading “Wood ear”
A tiny candlesnuff fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon, growing in the rotting wood and moss of the old willow tree (number 5477 ) by the footpath alongside the Lambrok Tributary.
Continue reading “Candlesnuff fungus”
by Simon Knight
I was looking for fungi recently in the park, but because it’s now getting late in the fungi season, I wasn’t finding anything that interesting. I was about to head home when the moss on a nearby oak tree caught my attention.
Continue reading “Mycena pseudocorticola”
This is fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) found, rather unusually, under a willow tree in the park; birch and pine are its preferred partners.
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Question from Tom Martin:
Found this on the pavement near my house. Do you know what it is?
Our quest to identify some of the many lichens that grow in the park continues with common orange lichen, Xanthoria parietina, also known as yellow scale or maritime sunburst lichen.
Continue reading “Common orange lichen”
Read on for pictures of a tiny candlesnuff fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon, growing in the rotting wood and moss of the old willow tree (number 5477 ) by the footpath alongside the Lambrok Tributary.
Continue reading “Candlesnuff fungus”
Mail from Ian Bushell:
Continue reading “Jack o’ Lantern?”
This is a picture of a bracket fungus on an oak tree in the park. The mycelium, which is the main part of the fungus, is growing invisibly inside the tree. This beautiful outgrowth is the fruiting body, part of the fungus’s reproductive system.
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 