Mushrooms. Aren’t they cool?! They’re delicious and nutritious, and they can also kill you. They help trees communicate and they can make you hallucinate. They can glow, they can control the minds of ants and they form a massive underground network that connects different plants, known (wait for it…) as the Wood Wild Web.
Back in autumn 2020 I was given a book called The Forager’s Calendar, which is a celebration of nature’s larder over the 12 months of the year. I started spotting mushrooms on our long lockdown walks and I became completely fascinated. The more I looked, the more I found: puffballs, fly agarics, chantarelles, penny buns – tiny wonderous specimen that I’d been walking past all my life but never noticed.
This is one of my favourites: the shaggy ink cap. It starts off as a cylindrical white mushroom with shaggy bits, then gradually its sides ‘melt’ into a black goo, which drips away until it’s completely disappeared. My kids were mesmerised; so was I.
Two photos of the same shaggy ink cap, taken just 24 hours apart.
Another of my favourites is the puffball. If you step on one when it's mature enough, it'll puff out a cloud of spores into the air, which is how they reproduce.
As the autumn of 2020 wore on, I started drawing and painting some of the fabulous fungi we came across, trying out different styles and techniques. I loved finding out fungi facts and would regale my children with them. They started yelling “MUUUMMY, ANOTHER MUSHROOOOM!” while we were out on walks and insist that I take a picture of every single one. I became known as 'Mummy Mushroom' (and I still am!).
Around this time I was contacted by the lovely Tim from Adventurous Ink, who asked if I’d produce a limited edition print of mushrooms to form part of an online exhibition he was doing with his company Adventurous Ink. Obviously Mummy Mushroom jumped at the chance – and here’s the result: a celebration of some of my favourite mushrooms.
There are still a couple of prints left in the limited edition print run, which you can buy in my shop here >
There aren't enough words to describe how fascinating fungi actually are, but here are my top five mushroom facts. May you go forth and notice the magical mycelia around you!
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The largest living thing on earth is an actual mushroom
It lives in Oregon and is a type of honey fungus (nicknamed the Humungous Fungus), which covers over 2000 acres and is thousands of years old.
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The bit of the mushroom we see is just the tip of the iceberg
Most of the it is actually hidden underground as ‘mycelium’, a web of tiny threads that connects plants and helps share nutrients. The Wood Wild Web!
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A certain type of mushroom can turn ants into zombies
There’s a parasitic fungus that infects ants with tiny spores and takes over their behaviour. Once infected, the fungus compels the ant to climb to a high location, where it ultimately kills the ant and uses its body to grow and spread spores, continuing its life cycle.
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Some mushrooms actually glow in the dark
The bioluminescence in some mushrooms is caused by a chemical reaction and not only creates a beautiful glow but is thought to attract insects, which help spread the mushroom's spores.
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And some mushrooms can even create their own wind!
To help disperse their spores more effectively, some mushrooms are able to release moisture into the air, causing a small temperature difference that generates a breeze.
What the actual...!
