At the back of Tettenhall church, a steep ramp and steps lead to the streets behind the Upper Green. At the top of the steps, a block of flats has a large lawn, at perhaps waist level, with some mature trees. Some autumns, this lawn supports various kinds of mushrooms.
This is a birch bolete, sometimes called brown birch boletes. It’s one of those fungi which is only found in association with one type of tree: birch in this case, of course.
More pictures of a selection of the Japanese acers in West Park as their leaves turn permutations of red, yellow, orange and purple (!) for autumn. To see how much the colours can change in a week or so, earlier pictures of the first two trees in this set can be seen here.
A quiet residential street, with a jay investigating one of the lawns, then flying onto the roof of the house when disturbed. As is the way when there’s just a fleeting opportunity, I had the wrong lens on the camera.
In Bantock Park, there’s a row of conifers and silver birches on the edge of the pitch and putt course. Most autumns, the area round these trees is good for mushrooms, with several different species including fly agarics.
This year has been quite a good one. The mushroom in these pictures was growing under the same tree as some fly agarics. The warty appearance marked it as some kind of agaric. The domed cap, looking very like a golf ball from a distance, meant it had probably emerged during the previous night.
This was pure white all over. Fly agarics have bright red caps, fading to orange after heavy rain. The white flecks on fly agaric caps are the remains of the veil which protected it when it was forcing its way through the soil. So our pure white mushroom must be a different, much rarer species.
Another visit to the park four or five days later ended such speculations. The mushroom had grown to its full size. As the cap expanded and flattened, the veil had now broken, revealing the red below.
Growing on a conifer stump in a front garden on Richmond Road, plums and custard. Such stumps, or fallen trees, are what these fungi feed on. Their name refers to their distinctive colour: they’re not edible.
The berries on a purple beautyberry in West Park living up to their name. The shrub is also supposed to put on a good show when the leaves turn to autumn colours before dropping off. But that happens very early in the autumn, and I always miss it.