Wolves Wild

Wintry scenes just a short walk from the centre of Wolverhampton.

These pictures in East Park were taken at the start of this week.

Umbellifer leaf covered in frost, pictured the first morning this winter I got out early enough to take pictures before the sun had melted the frost.

I was amazed to see that the same plant was still flowering: picture in a couple of days.

Barley Field in the Smestow Valley nature reserve, under mist and frost early yesterday morning.

The view across one of the ponds looking towards the house in the distance at Wightwick Manor recently.

Pictures from a re-visit exactly a week later to the fly agarics which feature here.

Rain has washed away most of the red colour from the caps, which are a bit more nibbled.

Mushrooms growing in the wood at Wightwick Manor recently.

They were growing among leaf-litter …

… and further camouflaged as more falling leaves landed on them.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/davea2007/8251212347

Glistening inkcaps, and indeed all inkcaps, deliquesce as they loose their spores.

The flesh of their caps blackens, then disintegrates.

The same spider’s web, viewed from opposite sides early one morning after a heavy morning dew.

Spider’s web in one of the Wightwick Manor garden bushes, outlined in the morning dew.

A pile of logs in the wood at Wightwick Manor. The white speckling on the cut ends of the logs is fungal, and quite likely to be the infection which meant the tree had to be cut down.

The bush with these fruit and berries was in a front garden. It is presumably an exotic, cultivated because the autumn leaves turn to almost the same shade of glossy red as the berries.

Further along, the bush had already lost its leaves, showing the twigs were supporting a healthy growth of lichens.

Buttercap mushrooms are also known as Greasy Toughshanks. These were growing in Bantock Park.