Wolves Wild

Pictures taken over the course of four days showing the developments of a group of mushrooms growing on a garden path.

At first the mushrooms had a tan cap, with a paler stem.

Later the cap faded to a duller pale brown, exaggerated here by the changing lighting conditions.

Notice the holes in the caps where slugs have been nibbling.  Tiny slugs are on the caps in some of the pictures.

Small new mushrooms, complete with the stronger cap colour, continued to pop up in the middle of the patch.

The path was covered in wood mulch to suppress weeds. It is possible that the mushrooms had been brought in with this mulch.

The mushrooms were probably bonnet mycenae, a common fungus,

Close-ups of another set of autumn leaves. This time from one of the cherry trees in East Park, lit from behind by a bright sun recently.

These inkcap mushrooms were less than a centimetre high, growing in the short grass in front of the Chestnut Tree pub in Finchfield.

A tiny arachnid, only a few millimeters in size, seemed to have lost one of its right legs.

Rowan (also known as mountain ash) leaves can turn a rich, dark crimson colour in the autumn. These leaves were on a rowan bush by the Birmingham Canal near the Stafford Road.

Catkins start to appear on alders by mid-autumn, before the current year’s seeds have completely ripened.

These pictures show the unripe seeds and undeveloped catkins on the same tree, as they were in mid-October.

Japanese maple by the West Park Southgate just beginning to change colour for the autumn, dwarfed by the tall conifer behind.

Fairies bonnets are tiny inkcap mushrooms which grow in tight clusers. These were at the base of a tree stump just off the main road at Worfield.

There are several species of yellow coloured waxcaps. These may be butter waxcaps peeping through the short grass.

There are worm casts to the left in this picture.

These tiny puffballs were barely rising above short-mown grass. These three were nevertheless the largest and most conspicuous of tens of tiny fungi growing in one of the grassed areas just inside the perimeter of West Park recently.

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.