Wolves Wild

I like taking pictures of fungi. They don’t flee if I get too close: creatures which don’t flee when I get too close are likely to attack instead. Even worse. They don’t move unpredictably when there’s even the slightest breeze, like many plants.

Admittedly, they are often hard to get a good view of: hiding where there’s not much light, half-hidden in vegetal detritus in an overgrown patch of rough ground. But they have an incredible variety of shapes and textures, and sometimes colours which cannot be seen anywhere else in the natural world. And once in a while they’re just a slightly twisted variation on a standard mushroomy shape, with colours which are bland. Lo, scurfy twiglets, Tubaria furfuracea.

Broad-leaved stonecrop is a popular ground-cover succulent, especially in rock gardens. A front garden with beds at waist height by the pavement meant I was able to use the macro setting on a mobile’s camera to get these close-ups, with water left after overnight rain reflecting off the fleshy leaves.

Yet another fungus I noticed but didn’t inspect closely enough to identify properly. It may be one of the twiglet group (more formally the Tubaria genus.

Dog’s mercury, another plant which gets its growing season and its flowering season done early in the year, before it is overshadowed by the leaf canopy above. These were growing in the hedgerow by the canal footpath at Compton, and the flowers were just starting to open.

Now the weather is getting warmer, a more varied set of fungi are producing fruiting bodies. These brittlestem mushrooms were in the hedgerow by the canal footpath at Compton. There’s multiple species of brittlestems that these could be, and I didn’t look closely enough to make any more detailed identification.

When marsh marigold is finally floweriing, spring is here at last, whatever the weather. These, on the Compton Park pond, weren’t quite there yet a week before the end of March, but they will be by now.