Category: David

Mushrooms growing in the wood at Wightwick Manor recently.

They were growing among leaf-litter …

… and further camouflaged as more falling leaves landed on them.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/davea2007/8251212347

Glistening inkcaps, and indeed all inkcaps, deliquesce as they loose their spores.

The flesh of their caps blackens, then disintegrates.

The same spider’s web, viewed from opposite sides early one morning after a heavy morning dew.

Spider’s web in one of the Wightwick Manor garden bushes, outlined in the morning dew.

A pile of logs in the wood at Wightwick Manor. The white speckling on the cut ends of the logs is fungal, and quite likely to be the infection which meant the tree had to be cut down.

The bush with these fruit and berries was in a front garden. It is presumably an exotic, cultivated because the autumn leaves turn to almost the same shade of glossy red as the berries.

Further along, the bush had already lost its leaves, showing the twigs were supporting a healthy growth of lichens.

Buttercap mushrooms are also known as Greasy Toughshanks. These were growing in Bantock Park.

Fungi growing from a crack in the wood in the lock gates at Wightwick Mill Lock recently.

The cap of this shaggy parasol in Hawthorn Wood had been well nibbled away when I noticed it.

The view looking towards Compton Lock on a misty autumn day.

Wightwick Mill Lock, the next lock towards the Severn, shortly afterwards.

Half way between the two, looking across to a field to trees fading into the mist which are growing along the Smestow Valley Railway Walk.

The field nowadays is mainly used by dog walkers. In the canal’s heyday, it was pasture where the bargeeshorses could re-fuel overnight.