Welsh records wanted

Field Mycology Volume 3(2), April 2002 On woodchip fungi ’ve been following with great interest the articles about fungi on woodchips in Field Mycology and thought you might be interested in some luxuriant fungal fruitings that appeared at Brandon Country Park, Suffolk, last Autumn. A children’s play area was created in 1998 no more than 20 yards from the visitor centre in the forest and spread with liberal amounts of mixed hardwood and softwood chippings. 1999 and 2000 saw huge stands of Coprinus lagopus throughout the summer and early autumn, a species otherwise quite scarcely recorded at the park and I felt that this augured well for more fungi in the coming years.The autumn of last year had to be seen to be believed. Cyathus striatus fruited in such vast quantities that it was in danger of smothering any other fungi trying to appear. Some fruited in rings and were so densely packed that (as one of the park’s volunteers observed) “they looked like someone had tossed old car tyres around the area!”. Not to be outdone Ramaria stricta also threw up over a hundred fruit bodies, the bulk of them appearing in more or less rigid straight lines on the edge of the chippings and providing an unusual fungal boundary fence. There were two real surprises. Volvariella caesiotincta, only ever seen twice at the park on rotting beech stumps, must have thought the wood chips looked too good to miss and sent up 20+ specimens, some noted with caps 10cm in diameter (first terrestial sighting of this fungus?). Some of the caps were wonderfully blue in colour and they were just a joy to behold. The other beauties were Entoloma icterinum in a clump of about 30 fruit bodies with their strong amyl acetate smell, – a new species for the park. Two other good ‘smellies’ were Macrocystidia cucumis and Mutinus caninus. The latter produced 40 eggs in one clump and produced stinkhorns in all stages of development. As leader of the public forays at the park, the groups I had didn’t have to walk very far at all to indulge themselves in some wonderful fungal fructifications and having some species with peculiar odours to demonstrate just made things all the more exciting. All the above appeared in the middle two weeks of October but at the end of the month Helvella lacunosa waded in with some real whopping fruit bodies, looking like a black mass of satanic melted candles. All these fungi appeared in an area measuring no more than 30 square feet. Quite extraordinary. Out in the daylight just by the visitor centre, Stropharia aurantiaca fruited for the first time on coniferous chips in 1998 and has appeared every year since. Jonathan Revett Cambs

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Welsh records wanted igel Stringer and Dic Davies of the Llanelli Naturalists Society are currently mapping the distribution of rusts, smuts and mildews in Wales. To date, over 6000 rust records have been databased, but the authors would still welcome further records and/or specimens for determination.

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Nigel and Dic hope to publish a summary of results by the end of Spring 2002 as a 60 page booklet costing around £5.00 (all proceeds going to the Llanelli Naturalists Society). Please contact Nigel for further information. R. Nigel Stringer: ‘Vendreth’, 53 Priory Street, Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire, SA17 4TY e-mail: [email protected]

Our next issue of Field Mycology is a special one dealing with all things boletoid. It will have keys and descriptions of European Xerocomus based on the latest DNA research; illustrations of rare and littleknown British boletes; notes on recent changes in bolete taxonomy and nomenclature as well as our usual not-to-be-missed columns on all that is happening in the world of mycology.

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