Colourful fly agarics in the shelter of a beech hedge at Bantock Park. Underground, they are intertwined with the roots of one of the silver birches which are a few yards away.
A group of earthstars from the Tettenhall churchyard. They are one of the rarer earthstar species, and had clearly been up for some time. They were battered – some looked like they had been kicked.
Most autumns, the corner of Tettenhall Upper Green between the paddling pool and the main road has tiny mushrooms barely peeping out of the short grass. They are parrot waxcaps. Bright yellow and shiny when they first emerge, they later turn to a shade of green somewhat similar to the feathers of some parrots: in some of these specimens, that change of colour is just beginning.
It;s possible that some of these pictures are of a related species. Butter waxcaps are also bright yellow and glossy, but don’t change colour.
It seems likely we’re in for a continuing spell of wet and breezy weather, so it’s unlikely we’ll get a good display of autumn leaves this year. Some bright colours are developing on trees such as ornamental cherries, such as these trees in Bantock Park.
The autumnal storms from the middle of last month brought a lot of rain. At the same time, the temperatures didn’t drop below the seasonal average until very recently. That’s a combination which encourages a lot of fungi to send out their fruiting bodies, at the time of year when the number of species which do so is at the peak. I haven’t been able to get out to anywhere that real surprises are possible. But even strolling around within the city, there’s been a good range of species.
Yellow cracking boletes are normally quite big for mushrooms, with caps which can get up to four inches or so across. This individual had forced its way up in the small patch of open soil surrounding a roadside tree, and was less than one inch.
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October-blooming Japanese anemone
Japanese anemone flowering earlier this month – isn’t that rather late in the year? I was asked to picture the flowers to show the contrast with the colour of the leaves of the sambucas (black elder) bush behind them. The contrast was more effective in reality than in my shots.