Tag: fungi

The return

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For those who have read my previous journal posts, it may be clear that I enjoy foraging. Foraging has taken on many forms for me, and this continues to grow as I learn more and experience each turning season and visit new places. Foraging extends deeper than a way to fill my belly. Undoubtedly that’s part of it, but foraging has layers. We can forage in different ways- for new skills, for connection, for meaning. 

As someone who lives on the road, foraging is an act that offers me a way to connect with place. Moving around can sometimes feel unsettling, but by noticing the natural surroundings it can help me to feel grounded. To forage I have to use my knowledge and senses, and this means I’m present to the physical space I’m in. I need to interpret what I see. I need to know what type of trees are in the wood, where the water is flowing. I need to be curious and observant. This knowledge I’ve gathered has come largely through experience, from going out with my backpack and basket. 

There’s a sentiment which I believe is attributed to tribal hunter-gatherers, “I’m just taking my spears for a walk”, rather than saying explicitly that you’re off to go hunting. It’s a way of not having any expectations of what you might catch, and quite possibly it’s a way of not jinxing any potential good fortune and not being hubristic. This is a sentiment I like to extend to foraging. I try to carry this in my mind when I’m also carrying my foraging basket. Rather than having this idea that I’m going out to find a particular fungi, or I’ll hit the jackpot with a megaload of bilberries, I say to myself that I’m just taking my basket for a walk. I try to be open to what might appear in my path, and recently, this was something special.

I was taking my basket for a walk in a deciduous woodland in the area of Newton Stewart, Dumfries and Galloway. Of course I had the hope that I might find some kind of fungi, but I wasn’t attached to the outcome. I realised I’d found myself on a deer trail. I could see the obvious signs of a slender path frequented by these beautiful creatures. Within a few heartbeats of this realisation I turned on the path and looked down at an antler on the ground. It was lying a few hoof steps away from a small shallow burn. I felt I was in deer territory and then like a sure sign the antler was there to confirm it. This was one of the unusual and unexpected gifts of taking my basket for a walk. I also happened to find some perfect hedgehog fungi, a small troop of chanterelles and I revisited a precious cluster of horn of plenty to find a couple of fresh ones. I returned with some dinner, and the antler. Even stranger, an hour or so later, in an obscure place in the woods, I met a person that I had met a few years earlier in Cumbria under very different circumstances. It was a serendipitous meeting; perhaps that antler acted like an antenna. 

I also have an interest in medicinal and therapeutic properties of plants and wild food. I have gathered and made my own tinctures from hawthorn, lemon balm, bilberry, goldenrod, to name a few. It may be that these tinctures have no physiological effect, but it isn’t just about the physical effect and the resulting tincture, it’s about the finding, the gathering, the creating. This is all part of the medicinal properties for me. I believe that this is why GPs are now prescribing walks in nature, because nature is medicine, and it’s where we’re from and where we have become disconnected from. It might sound woo woo or like I’m a tree hugger, but for me being “in nature”- foraging for food, medicine, meaning- is not only healing, it is vital to what makes me human and animal. I feel connected in a way I never will from going into a supermarket or pharmacy. 

On the rare occasion that I return from a walk with an empty basket, I have a calm mind and a satiated spirit. I cannot remember a time when I have returned without seeing or hearing something new; a bird call that I’ve never heard before, or a flower that has never bloomed before me until now. I may not have food for my belly but my soul is content. I return changed in some way. 

Fungi fascination

Jointhedots2 Comments

August and September are the months when my fungi field guides and foraging books make an appearance. I pore over them like a gripping novel. Each year I get to know a few more fungi, some tentatively, with plenty of cross-referencing for reassurance. It’s taken me years to build up the knowledge and experience to the stage where I can now confidently identify around ten edible types, and that for now, is plenty for me. Personally, foraging isn’t just about finding food anyway, it’s a lot deeper than that, something I’ll talk about in later posts. 

On a recent foray in the woods, my edible finds were chanterelles, winter chanterelles, and terracotta hedgehogs (left to right in the top photo). Interestingly, the hedgehogs I found were quite small and had a little dimple, some even a small hollow in the centre of the cap, not a characteristic I’ve seen before in this fungi. I did a quick search on Galloway Wild Foods, a fantastic resource for foragers and particularly useful as I’m in the Dumfries and Galloway region, where Mark Williams describes that he’s also found a few specimens in various locations with the same feature. These may or may not be a species called depressed hedgehog (!), however this isn’t known to grow in the UK, and they may just be a variant of the terracotta variety. Either way, they are edible and tasty!

I also found an edible milk cap that I’ve never seen before, and managed to identify it as lactifluus volemus, sometimes known as the Weeping Milk Cap (the specimen I collected is pictured in my hand). It was quite stunning how profusely the milk exuded from the cap when I cut it. Although this is classed as an edible fungi, I’m just not there yet, especially since it smells like a rubbery old fish when it’s been collected (which apparently disappears on cooking)! 

My non-edible find was another, smaller, milk cap that exudes white milk which turns yellow after a few seconds, a lactarius chrysorrheus (pictured resting on a page from the legendary fungi book by Roger Phillips, Mushrooms and other fungi of Great Britain and Europe). 

This is just a few of the fungi I found on one three-hour foray, which covered a remarkably small area of ground. It’s a different way of moving when you’re looking for fungi; you can’t walk at a fast pace, you have to slow yourself down, observe the surroundings, and sink closer to the soil. You don’t follow the worn, linear paths, stomping and sweating; you take considerate steps into the brash and leaf litter, winding as you walk, stopping often to scan the ground. Crouching down to get a fox’s-eye view of the territory, allowing your eyes to adjust, the fungi realm reveals itself. 

A wee disclaimer that this post is not intended as an identification guide. Please do your own extensive research and be absolutely sure of identification if you are planning to eat any wild fungi you collect.