Rotten beauty

It's been an autumn and winter full of fungi. Here are a couple:

A jewelled field mushroom

This might be a Pleurotacia, but then it might be a lot of other species too. It is a parasite on the stump of a dead pine tree:

Gilded gills

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.

 
And so, it turns out, do fungi.

Here's a fungus, photographed yesterday in the field (we call it “Camelot” because our friend Artur helped to create it) that the donkeys are using. Either its own spores have germinated, or it has another fungus biting it on the back.

Fungi break nature down into its component parts, so this is a melody of decomposition.

The gills are alive...

Floral sex

There are lots of ways of reproducing in the animal kingdom, as the brilliant Olivia Judson has shown; her 'Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation' is the funniest biology book I've ever read. Here are a couple of much more mundane examples from plants and fungi, gathered yesterday at the Croft. 

In the flowers camp I have picked two that illustrate another point - food and sex; the first is a Broomrape (Orobanche alba), a parasitic plant that has no chlorophyll and survives instead on the juices of, in this case, the thyme plant. The Thyme Broomrape has a sort of sweet smell of cloves and cinnamon. The second is an orchid, Orchis militaris. Both flower, and thus depend on pollinators to reproduce. The orchid may, like many orchids, have a specific pollinator species - which would mean that both it and the Broomrape depend on another species for survival.

Thyme for more juice

Military Orchid, in pacifist pink

 For spores, here is a splendid fungus; I am rubbish at identifying them, which is why I rarely collect them to eat them, but a friend of a friend suggests it might be the edible Leccinum Lepidum, or possibly but less likely a Suillus granulatus. 

Faeries be here