Fungi in Farningham Wood

Orpington Field Club walking through Farningham Wood.  2 October 2011.

This was a fungus field trip with the Orpington Field Club. Farningham Wood is one of the many patches of ancient woodland south of London, and logically enough it is on ground that would not be very profitable for agriculture; mostly gravel and sand, and some clay.

This trip took place after a week of unseasonably hot and dry weather, which is bad news for a fungus hunt. It's one of the few occasions when you hope that there has been plenty of rain recently. So we found fewer fungi than hoped, and many of them were dried up and dead-looking. But it wasn't all bad news.

The woods are full of sweet chestnut trees, whose canopies give a lovely green-gold light in sunshine. But there is an excellent mixture of other trees. Aspens and willows near the seasonal ponds; oaks and hornbeams elsewhere. There has been a lot of coppicing in the past, and although we didn't see any freshly coppiced areas, there was a big pile of cut trunks, so there is clearly management activity.

I took lots of photos of fungi, and a few other things, so I will show some here and some in a later post. Here are some of two different kinds of puffballs, both quite small and nothing like the giant puffball which is normally quite common in the woods.

The first, Scleroderma citrinum, has a hard and scaly skin; in fact its name means "hard skin." You can see that it has been split apart, and the photo on the right shows a cross-section, with the black spores developing inside.

When they mature, puffballs develop a hole in the top. The spores dry out, and any blow on the skin produces a powdery puff.

The second puffball, Lycoperdon foetidum, shown below, has a very different skin, and seems to be covered with small spikes, though they are quite soft to the touch. This one was growing on a layer of wood chippings, either chestnut or oak, where we found a few interesting fungi.

The chippings were under a power line, and were obviously the result of keeping the lines clear of vegetation.

Puffball, Lycoperdon foetidum. Farningham Wood with the Orpington Field Club, 2 October 2011.

We found both False Death Caps and the real Death Caps. First, the false:

False Death Cap, Amanita citrina var. alba.  Farningham Wood with the Orpington Field Club, 2 October 2011.

This fungus is normally yellowish, but this is a white variety. You can see that, like the famous Fly Agaric (a close relative), the veil that it bursts through as it grows is left in patches across the dome at the top. It has a strong smell of raw potato. It isn't poisonous, but it isn't tasty either.

Death Cap, Amanita phalloides.  Farningham Wood with the Orpington Field Club, 2 October 2011.

This is the real thing, and this is enough to kill a child. There are very few cases of poisoning in the UK, but it does happen that people eat it, mistaking it (as our expert said) for "God knows what." It really doesn't look like anything you would want to eat if you knew even a little about fungi, but I'm not going to attempt to explain why because I don't want to mislead anyone with false confidence. Americans, you will find plenty of it on your continent too.

Like the False Death Cap, it has a distinctive odour, and it's quite a different one. But an odour of what? I picked up three different descriptions of the smell: scrambled eggs, old faded roses, and stale urine. Clearly there is something organic and aromatic there.

Finally for this page, one of the wood's invertebrates; a fairly common hoverfly, found near one of the seasonal ponds, none of which had standing water, though the bottoms of some were still muddy.

Hoverfly, Myathropa florea.  Farningham Wood with the Orpington Field Club, 2 October 2011.

The top photo was taken with my Ixus 100; all the others with my EOS 60D and 100mm macro lens with ring flash.