Friday Fungus: Collins Mushroom Miscellany - a review

For Christmas, I received a copy of Collins Mushroom Miscellany by Patrick Harding. I thought I’d share some thought son it with you. The book isn’t a guide to mushrooms but a wander through the highways and byways of mushrooms, toadstools and assorted fungi.

Patrick Harding is a real mycophile having spent a fair chunk of his life teaching us lesser mortals about mushrooms and this miscellany is clearly a labour of love. In and amongst the content are some real delights such as how many fungi there are:

“...the number of known, named species is in the region of 100,000, and the total has been estimated to be closer to 1.5 million different species.”

Now that a whole load of ‘shrooms!

...and some of them are very old:

“Observations of fairy rings, especially those made by the fairy ring champignon (Marasimius oreades), have been made over successive years in an attempt to measure the average increase in diameter of the fruiting ring. As with the growth of trees there are good years and bad years for fungal growth. The rate of increase in the diameter of a ring...is in the range of 20-70cm per year. Even if we take the upper figure, rather than an average, this means that a ring of nearly 800m in diameter must have been made by an individual that is at least 1,100 years old.”

The book talks of ceps, morels, chanterelles and truffles and is beautifully illustrated with photographs and drawings It even tells us of the bad fungi – Serpula lacrymans, for example (dry rot, now happily quite rare in the UK) and Claviceps purpurea (ergot, the scourge of European cereals and source of madness). And of course the book describes the psychotropic mushrooms: fly agaric and the Psilocybe genus.

However, I like the book best for its chapter on M.C.C. (Mordecai Cubitt Cooke), Britain’s first professional mycologist – a man who got dismissed as a teacher for “...teaching too much science.” And who went on to help found the British Mycological Society and to produce the eight volume "Illustrations of British Fungi" for Kew.

M.C.C. is no relative but it is good to know that we share both a name and an interest in mushrooms!

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