David

Catkins start to appear on alders by mid-autumn, before the current year’s seeds have completely ripened.

These pictures show the unripe seeds and undeveloped catkins on the same tree, as they were in mid-October.

Japanese maple by the West Park Southgate just beginning to change colour for the autumn, dwarfed by the tall conifer behind.

Fairies bonnets are tiny inkcap mushrooms which grow in tight clusers. These were at the base of a tree stump just off the main road at Worfield.

There are several species of yellow coloured waxcaps. These may be butter waxcaps peeping through the short grass.

There are worm casts to the left in this picture.

These tiny puffballs were barely rising above short-mown grass. These three were nevertheless the largest and most conspicuous of tens of tiny fungi growing in one of the grassed areas just inside the perimeter of West Park recently.

One of the cherry trees by the Aldersley Stadium drive already in its autumn colours last month, while the trees in the background, bordering the Railway Walk, had hardly begun to turn.

I presume that when this garden was given a slate chipping mulch, it was to suppress anything trying to go there. It didn’t work with these mushrooms.

The fungi are inkcaps. Possibly they common inkcaps, a species which is actually not very common. But I wasn’t about to step onto a stranger’s driveway for a closer inspection.

Probably Drummond’s phlox, a garden plant originally from Texas. This summer has been decidedly cooler and damper than Texas, but the plant seems to have coped.

As this bee collects pollen from ivy flowers, it is getting grains of the pollen scattered over its body, including the surface of its compound eyes.

Honey fungus is found in clumps around the base of trees or tree stumps. It’s a parasite which kills the roots, and the infection has gone to far by the time the fruiting bodies appear.

This particular growth was on a tree which had fallen in a small wood by the main road at Worfield.