COLLECTING AND CONNECTING.

 

The mushroom season has come early this year, perhaps as a result of the dry spell throughout May and June. I discovered when living in Brittany that hunting for mushrooms was a national autumnal pastime. It also meant that if someone discovered a productive location it remained a closely guarded secret. Here in the Outer Hebrides it is rare to see anyone collecting mushrooms, and when they see me with a large bag of field mushrooms they invariably say they don’t know enough about wild fungi to risk picking them. Ignorance is not an option when it comes to foraging, and they are righto leave them alone. The same crosses my mind when I see certain highly processed food products in supermarkets. There are many good books on foraging and useful natural history knowledge as well as all the information one could possibly want or not want on line. I still have more faith in the printed word. As our knowledge advances at an ever increasing rate we seem also to be increasingly distanced from nature. I often hear this planet earth referred to as our planet. Such arrogance could only come from a creature with an oversized brain. Sure we have adapted well to become the dominant life form, capable of great and terrible things, but we remain simply another life form on earth and equally vulnerable to climate change.

In Lews Castle grounds the Celtic music festival is about to kick off, but I’m wondering if all those feet might be squashing a greater variety of fungi. Has this early start to the season seen boletus, chanterelle, russula, parasol and prince mushrooms? Are oyster mushrooms sprouting from deadwood, or my favourite hedgehog fungi scattering their milky golden trail through the woodland leaf mould? The recent rain has triggered growth both on the moor and my garden and flowering has been prolific. I’m now on my second batch of elderflower champagne. While the gannet population took a pounding last year and there are no great clouds of them diving of Garry and Traigh Mhor beach, there are other species that have fared better. The cuckoo call has now been replaced by the plaintive cry of the curlew and the progeny of three goldfinch nest line up on the barn roof and washing line. 

While cutting back an escalonia bush I was surrounded by what I thought where blue bottle flies. When one of them bit me I realise they were a very small variety of wasps and I had been trimming right above their beautiful paper nest. In the past I’ve had solitary wasps nesting in the porch, so I was pleased to welcome this little colony to my garden. I would rather be connected to nature than the internet.