Tuesday, 4 October
Not that it has anything to do with mushrooms, but I just have to share this image first — after all, I did roll around on the ground to capture this slowpoke crossing the road at Bull Run Regional Park …
Wikipedia describes a mushroom as:
… the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. Like all fungi, mushrooms are not plants and do not undergo photosynthesis. The standard for the name “mushroom” is the cultivated white button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus; hence the word “mushroom” is most often applied to those fungi (Basidiomycota, Agaricomycetes) that have a stem (stipe), a cap (pileus), and gills (lamellae, sing. lamella) or pores on the underside of the cap.
We’ve been to Bull Run Regional Park many times. I’ve seen the occasional mushroom while wandering the grounds, but never in the numbers or varieties that I saw them this past weekend. After all the rain we’ve been getting the mushrooms had … well, they had mushroomed.
My fascination with mushrooms started with these funnel-shaped fungi on our campsite;
the one pictured in the two photos on the left has an 8½-inch (~22 cm) diameter.
There were big ones, small ones, tiny ones. There were white ones, pink ones, yellow ones, brown ones, orange ones, black ones. There were even mildewed ones that looked a little green around the gills. Some looked like they were covered in velvet; others looked like they were gilded in gold. The variety I didn’t see was the kind you see featured in cartoons — the red caps with the white dots.
Every time I saw a new variety, I had to stop for a closer look. Of course, the shutter went click each time, too. If you’ve not photographed mushrooms, trust me when I say that one must be a contortionist :-) And you can’t be too fastidious — I have two pairs of slacks to prove that I wasn’t!
I have no idea if the mushrooms were edible or not — and I wasn’t about to find out. I kept my hands to myself and just let the camera provide a cornucopia of fungi to enjoy. Someday, when I have spare time on my hands (yeah, right!!!!) I’ll do some research to find out more about the mushrooms that were such a source of fascination to me. In the meantime, if you’re into mushrooms and can identify them, please leave a comment here or in my online gallery (link at the bottom of the post).
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(The photo in the lower left is the same mushroom after the Saturday night deluge.)
Not sure if this is a variety of fungi, but I liked the brilliant orange-yellow and couldn't resist clicking the shutter.
If you’ve not tired of the mushrooms featured here, or you’d like to see individual versions of some that went into the collages, feel free to visit my online gallery here.
