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| Entering the wood |
A small wood somewhere in Essex left to its own wild way, there was even a notice saying that the fallen trees from 1989 had been left in situ to complete their own ecosystem, something that may happen to the Sycamore tree so brutally cut down. For under the tree and in the soil it occupies there are a million organisms creating the soil. As in the following photographs as you will see the detritus of dead leaves, twigs and in the end the death of the mushrooms, they all recreate the humus that wild plants survive on.
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| Sweet chestnut tree |
This last photo is of the Amethyst Deceiver, a young juvenile, lavendar coloured but it can seem quite blue as it matures. Like the naming of moths, mushrooms apart from falling into same species families, can have exotic names.
Here is another mushroom hunt in Essex, Hanningfield Reservoir.
Catching the cuckoo
The only cuckoo I have heard in the last six years. Thank you for that.
ReplyDeleteThey are fast dying out I think, I used to hear one up on the moors Pat but I haven't heard one for the last two years.
DeleteSo thankful that we still hear the cuckoo in our garden and that we are serenaded by a nightingale through our open bedroom window. I even filmed the nightingale this June in daytime singing atop a dead tree in our wild wood, which under our watch of the last five and a half years has been left entirely to nature. I do hope the chainsawed Sycamore is left to slowly decay and enrich the soil around. I suspect though that tidy folk will wish to remove it and re-plant. Tidiness in the great outdoors is a scourge and fortunately for my garden all my tidy urges are limited to the veg plot and greenhouse and right now our newly-cut hedges. We live in the South Downs National Park but in the lee of the north facing folds that form the greensand ridge (deep rich Sandy loam which has been farmed since the Bronze Age) with a river valley and water meadows beneath us and then the land rises again to open sandy lowland heath. It is beautiful here but we are beset from time to time by nosy motorbikes, dangerously speeding cars, farm machinery robbery, even drug dealing … such is the world today. Sarah in Sussex
ReplyDeleteHi, it sounds lovely where you live and it is good to see someone agreeing that tidiness in the garden is and can be disruptive to the natural order of things. How marvellous to be able to hear the nightingale, I have never heard one. Three favourite birds that I love to hear are the cuckoo, curlew and the owls, though I must admit the buzzard wheeling over head, mewing I think is the word also stops me in my tracks. Eco-systems should be taught in schools so that children have the ability to see how everything depends on a cycle.
ReplyDeleteThose Amethyst Deceivers are surprisingly tasty in stews - if you find enough of them under a beech tree.
ReplyDeleteThey are such a pretty mushroom Tom. You must have eaten them then at some stage. My most favourite mushroom was an orange, I think morel mushroom in Switzerland. In a creamy sauce with frites.
ReplyDeleteLove to eat them, but do not think I could collect from the wild.
ReplyDeleteMostly Tabor people used to collect field mushrooms in the villages. But then there came it became the thing to serve 'wild mushrooms' in the London restaurants and of course they depleted the mushrooms in our woods and forests.
DeleteThe plaintive sound of a cuckoo in the springtime or early summer is quite magical and it always makes my heart skip a beat. Some great mushroom pictures there Thelma.
ReplyDeleteYes that was the time I had a half decent camera Neil. Some people I noticed when out walking would deliberately kick mushrooms to bits because they were 'poisonous'. Stupid idiots ;)
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