In the Garden

As we have the run of the place this weekend Fizz has been showing me around her estate.

This garden is on the opposite side of the house to my flat and I don't come here often. This is a lovely thick mossy lawn that you sink into and leave footprints.

It is mown regularly with one of those drive on lawn mowers but there is a thick bed of moss under the grass. It is full of mushrooms.

Thank you for showing me this Fizz. This is a really nice piece of grass.

I expect that we will be having a look at some of these mushrooms in more detail over the next few days.

I am going to start with this one.

This is called a Parrot Waxcap, Hygrocybe psittacina. It is one of the easiest Waxcaps to identify.

Well it is parrot coloured.

Most Waxcaps are edible but nothing special. They don't taste particularly good and many of the species are quite rare, for this reason it is generally frowned on to forage for Waxcaps. They are often slimy as well, so a bit off putting. There is no good reason to eat this one.

However the Parrot Waxcap is one of the more common ones and so I am going to cut a couple open and have a proper look at them.

Those colours are real by the way. It is a beautiful little fungi that could almost certainly learn to repeat things that you said to it, given time. Unfortunately the fruits don't last long enough to learn things like that.

These Waxcaps are regarded as an indicator of grassland quality. I have heard that they can only appear on grassland that has been maintained and unimproved (unfertilised) for at least thirty years. Natural grassland. So Fizz's grass is good grass.

As to what they are doing here, it was long believed that they were saprobic on grass roots but the thinking these days is that they have a mutually beneficial relationship with mosses. That would make good sense this is very mossy grass.

There is more fungi to come if I can just figure out what it is :)