David

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.

A single stand of mushrooms forcing their way through the tarmac of a pavement,

This is the third year in succession that the same species of fungus has grown, at the same time of year, in the same spot.

The first time was only a few weeks after the tarmac had been laid.

The hole where the tarmac is pushed aside by the growing mushrooms expands every year.

These pictures are in sequence, and show the development of the mushroom clump over the course of a week after I first noticed they were there.

Ruins of the one-time M & B Springfield brewery, which are getting more and more dilapidated.

The spring which gave its name to the one-time field is the source of the Smestow brook, now culverted until it has travelled under Wolverhampton racecourse.

Golden rod is often found in gardens, but this plant was growing wild next to the Birmingham Canal near the city centre recently.

There were also large clumps of Michaelmas daisies nearby: one of their flowers has also sneaked into the picture.

Intense red berries and reddening leaves of a viburnum growing wild by the Birmingham Canal: the bush is also a popular garden plant.

Small fern growing from the mortar of the viaduct carrying the railway over the Birmingham Canal near the Stafford Road.