Autumn musings

Autumn is a good time of year for taking stock of photographs and life in general. Shorter days mean less time behind the camera but more time for refining and reviewing; so here is a refined selection of clicheed images of the season from the LWI archive and some verbal padding about the much undervalued fungus family.

Autumn is about contrasts. Light and the return of darkness, colour and monochrome, piercing sunshine some days and grey murky mists the next, melancholy and joy, reflection and forward looking. As the sun dips towards the horizon, sunlight becomes softer, warmer in tone and more revealing and the 'sweet light' of morning and evening, so prized by photographers in the summer months, can last throughout the day.




Colour briefly paints the landscape as the leaves die and fall. Fungi lift their fruiting heads above the leaf litter giving splashes of colour and interest to the dim woodland floor.




Fly agaric Amanita muscari are always found close to pine or birch. It was birch for these handsome chaps near Silchester in Hampshire, the biggest examples I've seen at 16cm tall and the same across.

Fungi often grow in the company of just one or two species of plant and it is now accepted that most land plants have a dual relationship with fungi. This has long been recognised in orchids but applies to most other plants, whose wellbeing depends on association with fungal partners. What we see emerging from the leaf litter is just the reproductive part of a much larger organism under the surface, the mycelium. These mycelia form an intimate relationship with tree roots called mycorrhizas. Some even grow inside the cells of roots, others form a close sheath around them and from there send out thread-like hyphae that invade the surrounding soil, gathering nitrates and phosphates from decaying leaves. These nutients are then absorbed by the tree roots. In fact it is fungi that do the job we used to think root hairs did.

What does the fungus get out of it? It gets the leaves and their nutrients and the shade and humidity provided by woodland but with other plants the benefits for the fungus are less obvious. Orchids, for example don't seem to give anything back to their fungal partners and could be defined as parasites on fungi. We usually think of fungi as parasitic organisms so it's quite refreshing to think of something as beautiful as orchids parasitising mushrooms.

The Panther Cap is a less flashy agaric than Amanita

Ceps or 'Penny Bun' Boletus edulis

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Sunlight sets the beech woods aflame.

Stinkhorn ...................................................... and Dryad's Saddle

Stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus, attracts flies to its unpleasantly smelly head. They distribute the fungal spores by feeding off the gooey slime and getting covered in it in the process. They completely clean off this mucus in a short time, leaving a white spongey head. The fruit body emerges from a hen's egg sized structure called a volva (get's very suggestive doesn't it!) and grows at an astonishing rate of 8-10 cm in half an hour. This is not growth as such, but the rapid expansion of the honeycomb structure of the shaft as it bursts out of its 'egg'.

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Watcher of the woods.

Autumn path

Sea Buckthorn berries develop on the shrub's branches

Profuse haws are said to herald a harsh winter but this has not been true for many years in England

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Shadows lengthen

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Evening mist gathers in the water meadows of Bodiam in Kent

Happy musing and best wishes to all, Steve.