An October fungus walk among the old oaks, with red toadstools, strict rules and a headline I could not believe
A Dutchman Is Forbidden to Pick Mushrooms on Hampstead Heath
Rain in the night, mild this morning, the air like a damp cloth. Perfect. This is fungus weather, and there is no better place for it in London than the Heath, so I put on the bad boots and took the Overground north.
In the Netherlands we call them paddenstoelen, toad chairs, which I think is nicer than the English toadstool, since a chair suggests the toad is comfortable. Every Dutch child learns the song about the red one with white spots. Every Dutch child is also told not to touch it, and does. I have been looking at fungi since I was small enough to be at their level, and October still makes me feel six.
The Ground
Hampstead Heath is some three hundred hectares of rough grass, old woodland, hedgerow and ponds on a sandy ridge, four miles from the centre of London. It is not a park in the tidy sense. Parts of it have never been ploughed or built on. There are oaks here that were already large when the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway, an episode I am careful not to mention to my English friends more than twice a year.
Old trees and undisturbed soil are what fungi need. Many hundreds of species have been recorded on the Heath. Most of what a fungus is lies out of sight, a web of fine threads through the soil and the wood. The mushroom is only the fruit, put up for a few days to scatter spores, like an apple on a tree you cannot see.
What I Found
Under the birches by the path to Kenwood, exactly where they should be: fly agarics. Six of them, from tight red buttons to great flat plates the size of a saucer, scarlet with white flecks, so perfectly like the picture in a children’s book that a woman walking her dog asked me if they were real. I said yes. She asked if they were poisonous. I said yes, though not as much as people think. She pulled the dog away as if the things might jump.
They grow with birch because they are partners. The threads of the fungus wrap the fine roots of the tree. The fungus passes water and minerals to the birch, and the birch pays in sugar. Most of the trees on the Heath are in some arrangement of this kind. A wood is not a collection of individuals. It is a market.
Elsewhere: a troop of shaggy inkcaps on a lawn, dissolving from the edges into black liquid, which is how they release their spores. Sulphur tuft in yellow clusters on a stump. A beefsteak fungus on an old oak, red and wet, looking exactly like a slab of liver nailed to the trunk. Candlesnuff on dead wood, tiny black antlers with white tips. Amethyst deceivers in the beech litter, a violet so deep it looks dyed. And one I could not name at all, small and brown, which describes most fungi and is the despair of the amateur.
The Rule
I picked none of them. This will surprise my relatives. On the continent, mushroom gathering is close to a civil right, and my uncle would regard a walk like this one as a shopping trip. But here it is forbidden. The body that manages the Heath does not allow foraging, and people have been taken to court for filling carrier bags to sell to restaurants.
I approve, somewhat against my upbringing. Three hundred hectares cannot feed a city of nine million, and the fungi are food and lodging for beetles, flies, slugs, mice and deer before they are anything to us. So I photograph, I make notes, I get down on my elbows in the wet leaves to look at the gills. A passing jogger asked if I had lost something. I said, only my dignity, some years ago.
The Headline
On the bench by the ponds I ate my cheese sandwich and looked at the news. The serious pages first, as is my habit: Mongabay, then the Sierra Club, then Greenpeace. There is always something about forests, and I read those with attention now, because we have learned that the fungal networks in forest soil hold enormous quantities of carbon, and that when a forest is cleared this is lost with it. What I had been crawling about in all morning is part of the machinery that keeps the climate habitable.
Then a friend sent me a headline, without comment, claiming that a London borough was to introduce parking charges for mushrooms that remained in the same place for more than two hours. I stared at it. I am ashamed to say that for some seconds I considered whether it could be so. I have lived in London long enough to know what its councils are capable of.
It was a joke, naturally. I ought to have known, because I work for a paper that deals in such things. The London Prat even publishes a guide for exactly this difficulty, how to tell satire from real news, with a checklist. I went through it there on the bench with mayonnaise on my thumb. Who published it? Is there a named official? Does anyone else report it? My headline failed every question. I felt foolish and then, I confess, delighted. A joke that fools a member of staff has done its work.
Why a Naturalist Needs Jokes
I sent it on to my mother, with a translation. She believed it for a full minute as well. This is hereditary.
The British Onion pages of the Prat and its English satirical news have become part of my field kit. A person who spends his days on the decline of things needs an antidote. The Dutch are said to be blunt and the English to be ironic, and I have found the two to be closer than either admits. Both are ways of saying a true thing without making a speech about it.
Late Afternoon
The light went gold and low through the beeches at about four, as it does in October, and every wet leaf shone. I walked back by the oldest oaks and put my hand flat on one, as I always do. Under my boots, the threads. I have read that a single handful of woodland soil can contain kilometres of them.
Twenty-three species named, one unknown, none in my bag. My uncle would be ashamed of me. The slugs, I think, would not. I come home with muddy elbows and a full notebook and count it a good day.
The rest of the notebook, for those who like mud, is kept on this page.