winter’s mushrooms

Mushrooms are growing all over the grove and lower area of the property. Why so heavy here, I’m not sure. But they’ve sprung up throughout, everything from scatterings of fairy-sized knobbly orange buttons to dense, wrestling clumps of heavy, leathery, soil-encrusted brown wads that break open seams in the damp earth.

On closer inspection, I also found a few taut yellow puffballs nestling in protected spots; occasional singular broad orange specimens; some pale, almost silvery cream ones, discretely hidden among drifts of sun-bleached fallen gum leaves, delicately fluted around their darker rims, sometimes flipping elegantly upward.

I don’t recall so many, or such variety, before – perhaps I’ve not looked hard enough, but the prevalence this year and so concentrated in this area is striking. It’s an area where I’ve worked increasingly with swales and mulching, so perhaps this is a sign that it’s holding water longer and more deeply than I’ve appreciated, or the depth of leaf mould is an especially inviting environment.

The area is lightly planted with trees – olives well established, existing gums (yellow box, grey box, ironbark), a few self-sown wirilda and drooping cassinia, and the newly planted windbreak plants, a variety of acacias, hop bush, bursaria and saltbush. The ground is heavy clay – it supports a little grass and ground-hugging weedy plants, but mainly moss. The larger mushrooms push through this, though the smaller and more delicate mushrooms have appeared in areas where leaf mould has deepened, or where shallow dips in the ground’s surface have allowed a little build up of soil or finer debris.

A closer look elsewhere (the less ‘worked’ areas of the block) show some mushrooms, but not very many, and some different varieties. There are a few of the regular white, pebble-like puffballs, some more scattered little golden toadstooly ones, almost comically bright against the moss-covered slope below my study, and even a few pale, rounded, white-gilled ones.

Identifying and learning about these observed mushrooms will be an interesting challenge!