There were none here yesterday, and by the end of tomorrow they’ll have deliquesced and disappeared, but for now the neatly mown grass under our feet was studded with 2in-tall parasol inkcaps (Parasola plicatilis). They looked like an invasion of tiny parachutists; in reality they’d risen from the underworld.
They were here all along, as a mycelium of microscopically slender hyphae, down among the grassroots. Autumn is the fungal forager’s season but fungi, as hyphae or spores, are everywhere, unseen, all the time. Occasionally, driven by the imperative to reproduce, their ramifying network of independent threads collaborates, producing spores in toadstools. Some, like these inkcaps, are ephemeral; others, like the dryad’s saddle (Cerioporus squamosus) we’d been watching since spring, grow from teacup to tea-tray proportions, slowly digesting dead wood, taking months to reach maturity.
Dryad’s saddle is Britain’s largest bracket fungus. Photograph: Phil Gates
What changed overnight on this lawn, unseen, in the soil? Had several square yards of inkcap mycelium finally accumulated enough strategic reserves and sent signals fizzing along its underground network, with the order to send toadstools breaking through into the daylight? Was rain the trigger, a sudden downpour, softening sun-baked, droughted ground just enough for the fragile inkcaps to emerge?
Fungi, evolutionarily closer to animals than to plants, behave in mysterious ways. Some, like the bright orange nettle clustercup rust (Puccinia urticata) that we found distorting stems and leaves of stinging nettles along the lane here, live complicated lives, switching between different hosts. It spends half its life cycle on sedges, unnoticed, before producing its minute clustercups, brimming with spores, on nettles in the summer months.
The life cycle of nettle clustercup rust fungus alternates between stinging nettle and sedge hosts. Photograph: Phil Gates
The accolade for the most architecturally impressive fungus went to an immaculate group of oyster mushrooms, growing on fallen logs. In the silence of the beech wood there was a sense of awe when we peered under the tiered smooth grey brackets, with their radiating rows of gills, like the fan vaulting of a cathedral roof. But there was also a hint of menace: Pleurotus ostreatus is carnivorous. Tiny nematode worms, attracted to the perpetual moisture of wood softened by fungal rot, are paralysed by the toadstool’s toxin, unable to escape its hyphae that invade and digest them.
Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount