Fungi...the Bogeymen?

 Now is the time of the Fungi, the time for those otherworldly  beings to come…

“Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly…..

 …..We shall by morning
         inherit the earth             *           

         

The mycological world is an alien one, the stuff of legends and myths.  There is something disquieting, slightly disturbing, about fungi. Mushrooms especially the bland supermarket staples are fine but the others… even the ceps, the chanterelles, the meaty field mushrooms…they all carry that hint of danger.
What if they are not what they seem?

Horn of plenty

Then there are the tales of magic mushrooms, of “trips” and “highs”.. but which are the right ones and which are the traps for the unwary?  Masters of deception, many have their deadly doppelgangers.
Witches and shamans have long been associated with the fungi and their properties...and fairies, from a time when the wee folk weren’t the  pretty little bundles of joy of our modern children’s stories but vindictive sprites.  The penalties for stepping into a fairy ring could be severe.. early death or, at best, a life of “want and woe”.
They are neither plant nor animal but something quite different. Consumers of the dead, fragile yet resilient, pale yet vivid, they are part of that dark chthonic realm, the realm of the gothic and the macabre.

 Shaggy ink caps or Lawyers wigs

The woodlands that give shelter and sustenance to  huge numbers of fungi are threatened by their microscopic cousins.   Larch, chestnut and elm have all been attacked and now the  ubiquitous ash is their latest victim. The giant elms have all but gone from our hedgerows, forgotten, and, with them, the micro- environment they sustained.   Will those magnificent ash trees be next?  What will our countryside and, indeed, our towns, look like if we lose our ash trees.
Yggdrasil the world tree, the sacred tree that Odin hung on for “nine long nights” in Norse mythology was an ash tree.   Its wood is so good a fuel that our word for the remains of a fire share its name.  It is the last to come into leaf and the first to shed them.  Let us hope they survive.

Doomed?

*
Mushrooms   Sylvia Plath