Corona Wildlife Diary: Day Twenty-eight

I'm taking the day off today (hey, I've been doing this for four weeks straight!) so I thought I'd let my wife / pandemic partner Clare write about some of the more overlooked wildlife we have in the garden. Clare's special interest is fungi. And though her Bank Holiday discovery may have been microscopic, it's just as fascinating and beautiful as the birds and butterflies.

Clare's always been interested in fungi. In fact here's a page from her nature notebook in 1988. 

In the last four years though she's become REALLY interested in fungi. She's discovered a whole world of brittlegills, stinkhorns, waxcaps, deceivers, deathcaps, rusts and smuts. She finds even the tiniest fungi fascinating and I lose her for hours on end as she stares down her microscope.

I'll hand you over to Clare... 

_______________________________________________________

Day Twenty-eight

Over the past four week it's been a joy to see people sharing stories of life, wild life, continuing on around us. But when the camera turned to my back garden, I confess to a sudden and powerful empathy with Hyacinth Bucket and that matter of 'Keeping Up Appearances'. Because – with time taken up by work and other interests – our wildife garden had become somewhat more unruly than we had originally planned.

So it was that I found myself on the first day of the bank holiday intent on tidying up the 'vegetable patch'.

Last year's Fennel has stood here all winter; its stems now well and truly dead. So I thought I'd start by clearing these away. It took longer than I thought as, while I was chopping them into bits to go in the garden waste bin, I got rather distracted by the tiny bumps and speckles which adorned them.

The thin stems in the Fennel's upper reaches were most intriguing, being covered in a smattering of tiny fuzzy-looking specks. So some of these were saved from the garden waste bin and came into the house with me. I popped them in a box with some damp kitchen roll and waited to see what would happen.

Here's one of those stems after it's moistened up a bit. You might just be able to make out those fascinating specks?

Another hour or two passed, while I figured out how to change a light bulb in the stereomicroscope.

It was worth it, because these aren't just any old specks. They are in fact beautiful soft grey cup funguses fringed with crystal-white hairs.

At the highest level of magnification, I could just make out some tiny square clusters of dots – a telltale sign that what I'm looking at here is a fungus which holds its spores out on prongs [sterigmata]: it's a basidiomycete.

I think what I've got here might be Lachnella alboviolascens; but there may be similar species and I haven't yet managed to track down a key.

The authors of 'Fungi of Temperate Europe' describe Lachnella as "a genus of dessication-tolerant cyphelloids... In dry weather the fruit bodies close and form small, hairy balls." You can actually see this in action under the microscope – these photos were taken over the course of about 15 minutes.

Those weren't the only interesting specks on the Fennel.

The thick stems were covered in tiny black bumps which – taking a lead from 'Ellis & Ellis' – I think might be Leptosphaeria libanotis, with a "depressed-globose" shape.

I can't work out if the even-tinier specks shown here [TOP] with the Lachnella for scale [BOTTOM] is a baby version of the Lachnella, or something different. Might need to get the slide microscope out...

Anyway, I think we've established why the garden's such a mess. And maybe messy's just fine for funguses.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

So, thanks to Clare for today's contribution to the diary and for tidying up the vegetable patch (although she did abandon that job pretty quick when she found the fungi and spent the next few hours staring down a microscope). 

I thought you'd enjoy the insight into the sort of fascinating conversations we're having now we're locked in together 24 hours a day, every day.

You can read all of Clare's mycological adventures on her blog 'Misidentifying Fungi' (here)

Where you'll sometimes find her looking at much bigger fungi that sometimes look like this...