Wood-chip Shadows and Funeral Bells
in the Fungus Garden of Nowhere in Particular
The 30th January; a sunny Saturday with only my shadow for company on 'the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular'.
A list of things to do circumnavigated the garden several times and so there was no choice but to send my shadow off around the site, to take photographs and imbibe the pleasant spring like hours, while I got on with the nitty gritty and nitty muddy tasks. I am the head gardener of the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular and thus I cannot be distracted by my shadow wanting to play hide and seek.
I tried not to begrudge my shadow the pleasure of exploring the margins of the garden and of discovering new and mysterious things, however I was disappointed to be presented with as many shadow-selfies at the end of our gardening day. Still, despite the inane vanity of my shadow, it discovered some mysterious fungi at the edge of a path between the briar patch, apiary, and forest garden.
Is there enough information in the photographs below to identify the fungus correctly and confidently?
The fungus is growing in a layer of wood chip that was applied as a mulch in the spring of 2015.
I know a lot of fruit (apples and pears) and leaves have also fallen and rotted in that area, and that persistent wet weather has made the ground/top soil very moist.
We (my shadow and I) don't know which species of trees were chipped to make the mulch.
I have not seen fungi like this growing on the allotment/forest garden.
Alas, my shadow and I are not much of a mycology field student (together or apart) - for the photographs below represent the limited extent of our examination of the fungal forest garden emanations.
I admonished my lackadaisical shadow for the lack of measurements, site sketches, photographs of the undersides, and of close-ups of the stems.
"Why didn't you think to pull away some of that chip and leaf litter to examine the bases?" I asked.
My shadow murmured something about being afraid of things that might be poisonous.
"Take some latex gloves out with you if you are that worried," I replied.
Days later; my tungsten cast shadow and I tried to use our Dorling Kindersley, 'Mushroom and Toadstools, The Illustrated Guide to Fungi' (Thomas Laessoe, 2013), to identify the fruiting bodies of the forest garden of Nowhere in particular.
Nothing is ever identified correctly in the head of the head gardener of the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular. It should be said that it is only in his head that I am the head-gardener.
Any claims for an authoritative and correct identification emanating from his head should be regarded as dubious, especially when our head comes to mushrooms and toadstools.
We (my shadow and I) studied the mycorrhizal expertise of the book, including the identification key.
After much page turning (and returning) we arrived at, Galerina marginata, Funeral Bell (page 258).
The presence of a skull with crossbones caused alarm bells to ring. Could, or should, we have arrived at a different fungus using that book? The 'Funeral Bell' is a very toxic mushroom and bears a close resemblance to a different mushroom that is safely edible to humans.
My shadow complained of a stomach ache and dizziness.
I am aware of more fungi growing around the site - of fruiting bodies emanating variously from their mycelia, of the hairy 'filamental' colonisation of the rotting garden of Nowhere in particular.
I hope the fungi are signs of the improving health, quality and fertility of the soil.
I understand that the hyphae of fungi connect with the roots of plants to form beneficial and symbiotic relationships.
Recently, I read about a 'multi-systems vertical urban farming project', 'The Biospheric Project', in Manchester. The project uses wood chip, fungi inoculated logs, and tree stumps as a mulch to encourage beneficial fungi that aids the circulation of nutrients in the soil. The mulch may also act as a sort of remedy for heavy metal contamination of the soil*.
I don't know of any such contamination in the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular although I am reluctant to even consider having the soil tested to find out. I assume the allotment is established on land free from that sort of serious contamination. Am I a willing naif?
I have cultivated a mind-set based on naivety and assumptions; even ignorance, to maintain a level of gardening activity by which I think I am making progress and achieving some sense of success in trying to keep up with the garden. The garden has been fertilised by belief more than understanding, and there is a need for a balance of those fertilisers. Can I allude to the N-P-K ratio, and add faith, as the third element, to my fertilising mix? My shadow, still complaining of nausea, stopped to contemplate the philosophical complexities of fecundity in the substrates of the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular. Bad faith, bad faith, bad faith.
I cannot be stopped in my tracks like my shadow was. Of course, a garden has ways of disturbing the mind-set of a gardener, not least by the ways various garden constituents are toxic - to other plants and animals (including humans).
'Garden constituents' can also include objects and materials employed by gardeners - which are unwittingly (or not) toxic and contaminating.
Is it an anthropomorphism (or pathetic fallacy) to consider this disturbing behaviour as malevolent on the part of the non-human constituents of the garden?
Which toxic feelings and responses are exclusively human in the poison garden of Nowhere in particular and thus, when attributed, the stuff of a pathetic fallacy?
Why not, for example, regard the sting of a nettle as spiteful? Isn't the irritation caused by bare skin (and skin through clothing) in contact with stinging nettles a long-evolved relationship between humans and that plant?
Is there really no evolutionary and natural connection between the physiological and emotional/psychological effect of being stung?
The head gardener of the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular, with or without his shadow, does not believe that the plant has just passively (vegetatively?) developed the stinging characteristic. Oh no! Oh no, those nettles are out to get him, and his shadow, good, bad, in-between, either side, under and over. The sight of a gardener, and his shadow, cursing the living daylights out of a common or garden weed is a curious, but not uncommon, evolutionary and existential spectacle.
Saturday night Sunday morning saw my shadow lost, absorbed by a mycelium rich dream in the drizzle sodden mulches of the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular.
The company of my shadow was nowhere to be found on the sodden sun-less Sunday but, thankfully, Alan visited and together we wheelbarrowed loads of wood chip from Organiclea, to the muddied paths of Plot B where another form of forest garden is in the process of being established.
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