AUTUMN FUNGI.
IT has been a great year for nuts, and it looks like becoming a wonderful year for blackberries, but the mushroom crop is best described by the term which is invariably applied by all the experts to the partridge season, "patchy." There was a sudden flush of mushrooms in the warmth of July; when a few hot nights succeeded the dripping month of June, but since that little outburst of growth mushrooms have been scarce. The nights have been cold and the days• have been sunless, and the fields in which Agaricue campestris flourished'
last September this year are green and empty. On the other hand, some of the fungoid growths which belong to woods, and in certain cases to lawns and open spaces like golf-links, have been unusually abundant. Last summer the woods were so dry that the mycelium of many species must have remained dormant and unproductive. This year there seems to have been an increased output of spores, and in many places the floor of the woods is almost as strikingly altered in colour as it is altered in spring by the carpets of primroses and blue- bells. There are changes not in colour only. The writer's experience may be unfortunate, but he has never known that hateful but interesting fungus, the stinkhorn, to be so per- sistent and so ubiquitous as during the present early autumn.
It has appeared in almost every possible situation—on banks, under shrubs, bursting up through the turf of woodland rides.
In some ways almost as objectionable have been the abnormal quantities of the big yellow toadstools, Boletus elegans, which are so common in larchwoods. Boletus elegans is a hand- some fungus, and spreads broad, gold tables under the trees for the elves of the nursery stories— "you dewy-puppets, that By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make Whereof the ewe not bites ; and you, whose pastime Is to make midnight-mushrooms "- but it has a detestable habit when it reaches maturity of decomposing into brown and shining corruption, spilt like loathly platefuls over the carpet of larch-needles. It is an
endless business to pick or to dig out Boletus elegans on its first appearance, but is there any other way of avoiding the hideous cycle of growth and decay ? Possibly some method of top-dressing the soil under trees has been found effi- cacious in preventing the growth of fungi which rot at maturity ; if so, there must be a good many people who would like to hear of it.
But it is only a certain number of fungi, of course, which decay in this aggressive fashion. Others pay for their house-room with a display of very delicate beauty of colour and form, and some of the commonest are the prettiest.
There is the little Clitocybe toccata, for instance, which can be found in almost any wood or hedge through the summer and autumn ; it is one of the smallest and lightest of fairy parasols, two or three inches high, and in two colours ; one is a warm red-brown, and the other (var. amethystina) is rich amethyst. It has a pleasant, mushroomy smell, too, and its old age is merely tough and wrinkled. Quite as attractive in colour is another fungus, common in fields as well as woods, but perhaps more frequent under beeches than elsewhere, the Mycena Tura, pale mauve, and to be distinguished from Clitocybe by its connected gills. These are slight and delicate rather than bright or showy; so is Stropharia aeruginosa, the verdigris agaric, which grows on rotten wood on the ground, and lifts from a slender stem a pileus of bronzy, metallic blue-green. It is a pity that these delicate fungi should lose their colour when picked, or they might be used with mosses for table decoration, as the hand- some fly agaric can be used, or the little scarlet elf-cup, Peziza coccinea, though the latter is a spring rather than an autumn fungus. The scarlet elf-cup is, perhaps, the best known of its kind, but there are other commoner elf-cups which are as quaint if not as brilliant; there is the bladder elf-cup, Peziza vesiculosa, for instance, to be found almost anywhere among rotting leaves—a horn counterpart to the royal coccinea. But perhaps the most brilliant and the most common of autumn fungi are the various species of Bussula, the stiff, brittle little growths which, like other fungi, seem to prefer the neighbour- hood of beeches to other trees. There are forms of Bussula which carry brown, purple, green, olive, yellow, red, and bright rose pilei, and there is no more vivid spot of colour in the autumn woods than one of these crimson fungi—Hussu,la emetica, perhaps—set like a tiny sideboard in a wall of moss about the tangled roots of a hedgerow beech. It was surely one of the Russulas, which are distinguished by a peculiarly bitter and pungent taste (emetica speaks for itself), which the hero of Mr. Wells's story, " The Purple Pileus," swallowed, and Which urged him to so frantic and glorious a re-entry into his intolerable family circle. We forget for the moment whether the purple pileus was swallowed in summer or in autumn. In autumn, in any case, it is less incumbent on enthusiastic gourmets to point out the virtues of edible fungi than in spring and summer. In the summer the enthusiast has his
opportunity. He may point to the fact that in the ordinary Englishman's mind there exist but two edible fungi: one is the ordinary mushroom, Agaricus campestris, and the other is its larger relative, the home-mushroom, Agaricus arvensis, which can be used for ketchup. He can then proceed to compare Gallic alertness, thrift, and perception with English obtuse- ness, intolerance, and wastefulness by pointing out that his own countrymen entirely neglect the St. George's mushroom, Tricholoma gambosum, which is the French champignon, and is used in French cookery perhaps to a greater extent than any other vegetable. That is the enthusiast's opportunity on a summer's day. But he must be less laudatory of fungi in autumn, when gambosum no longer sprouts on every mead; and when he can merely declare of his own knowledge that this or that species, hardly to be distinguished from its poisonous neighbour, is edible and delicious, he will find fewer and fewer disciples to follow him. Indeed, the potential disciple may possibly arm himself with a quotation from the acknowledged authority on British edible fungi, Dr. M. O. Cooke. Dr. Cooke warns the searcher for delicate additions to his table fare that there is no royal road to distinguishing edible species. " The only safeguard is to become acquainted, by means of well-defined features, with some of the best esculent species, and by no means to experiment with those that are unknown." And Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, in the Haslemere Museum Gazette, raised an important question which has not yet been properly answered, when he suggested in 1907 that the deaths of sheep, cattle, and horses may be sometimes caused by their having eaten poisonous fungi. "Sheep do unquestionably sometimes nibble at the Russulas and Amanita phalloides, and they also sometimes die with all the symptoms of agaric poisoning."
Si Jonathan Hutchinson, indeed, has worked untiringly to bring the study of fungi into the important place which doubt- less it should hold, particularly in the matter of poisoning and in the processes by which the various growths are propagated. In his educational museum at Haslemere there is a collection of fungi in which some of the specimens are renewed daily. Not only that, but the curator of the museum, Mr. E. D. Swanton, has written an admirable handbook, "Fungi, and How to Know Them," which must have introduced hundreds of readers to a fascinating study ; and he has established some important facts, hitherto obscure, from personal observation. He has discovered, for instance, by keeping records of the appearance of fungi in the neighbourhood of Haslemere, that there are certain species with cycles of three years of life, so that if the fungus appears in a particular place in one year it will not be seen for the next two. Many questions of the life-cycle of fungi still remain obscure and difficult; so do the processes by which the spores are carried or dispersed. Some, like the spores of the stinkhorn, may be carried by the excreta of flies, which feed on the glutinous top of the mature fungus. Many are carried by air and some by water —deposited, for instance, at fresh places on the banks of a stream. One at least, the destructive F071742 annosus, which feeds on pine trees and does an enormous amount of damage every year, is carried by rabbits rubbing their fur on affected tree-roots laid bare in their burrows. Animals, of course, carry many spores ; even human beings, either in their clothes or in other ways, carry spores to fresh ground. They may even do so deliberately, if perhaps without thought, as when they kick at puff-balls on a. lawn or in a field. Puff-balls in September are often a nuisance to golf
players looking for their own or an opponent's ball; and it must be a not uncommon golfer's experience to observe an irascible player in the act of swiping at an offending gasteromycete, presumably by way of ending its existence on the spot, but in reality dispersing living spores of the detested vegetable in a thousand different directions.
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