A Forest in the Fog

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary describes a visit to Hamsterley Forest in Co. Durham on a foggy day.

The forest is a mixture of deciduous trees and conifers, with some fine beech plantations and some ancient oaks. Forests have a wonderfully mysterious, spooky quality when the sun begins to break through the fog.

In addition to the usual Scots pine and Sitka and Norway spruces there are some less familiar conifers, like this western hemlock. Its blunt resinous needles have an appealingly fruity, citrus-like aroma  when you crush them.

Hamsterley is always a good destination for a fungal foray - this (I think) is the larch bolete Suillus grevillei and this ...

... is yellow stag'shorn Calocera viscosa.

This looks like Coriolus versicolor, not yet fully expanded. The brackets exude droplets of moisture underneath.

And finally, one toadstool that's unmistakeable - stinkhorn Phallus impudicus. These always appear in large numbers in early autumn in a Norway spruce plantation in the forest and if you happen to be approaching from downwind you become aware of their presence from some distance. This is a perfect specimen that must have grown up overnight ....

.... and here' one that's probably a day old. Flies have carried off all its sticky brown spores, leaving one late arrival with nothing to eat. Slugs have already made inroads into the remains.

Stench

A beautiful sunlit glade in the Gaunless Valley in County Durham, on an idyllic late summer afternoon ...... and there's a sickly stench drifting down-wind. A decaying corpse? Sewage? No, just ..........

..... a stinkhorn toadstool Phallus impudicus, with an attendant swamp of bluebottles, protruding through the wood sorrel leaves. That netted cap of the fungus is coated with a gelatinous mass of brown, sticky spores when it first reaches maturity, but by the time I found this one the flies, attracted by the evil smell, had either eaten them already or carried most of them away on their feet. Stinkhorn spores can pass through a fly's gut without harm and are dispersed in their droppings.

John Ramsbottom, in his classic Mushrooms and Toadstools in the New Naturalist series, published in 1953, relates several entertaining anecdotes about stinkhorns. "The stinkhorn is often the cause of needless anxiety about sanitation", he observes, and mentions how he was able to pinpoint the fungus as the cause of noxious smells that were ruining the business of a tea room on the Norfolk coast. He also mentions that in a letter to The Times in 1865 the correspondent put forward the theory that the fungus could cause cholera and similar epidemics. Of more interest to the naturalist, he relates how the fungus is very attractive to slugs, that can detect the smell from a distance of 'six or seven yards away", on account of their ultra-sensitive antennae. Apparently they visit the fungus at night and help to disperse the spores by eating them. Rather them than me.....