Go and find some mushrooms

It's enjoyable to walk around with your head held high, admiring the clear blue skies, taking in the sun, listening to our avian friends, glimpsing the odd fluttering butterfly. Another quieter, almost hidden world lies beneath our feet. We sometimes catch sight of this world after rain when the mushrooms emerge.

These 'fruiting bodies' we know as mushrooms, although technically a mushroom is only the spore-bearing bit that we usually see and pick. The correct term 'fungi' is a fairly drab and unappealing term and has all sorts of negative associations with poisoning and infections. Mushrooms, however, are the astonishing clear-up merchants of the world. Life without their work breaking up dead plant material would be a bit more messy and certainly less interesting. Not only a source of food, there is an argument that human consciousness and imagination only took on full development way back 100,000 years ago thanks to the shamanic use of psilosybe (magic mushrooms) and that this paved the way for the development of religions and philosophical enquiry! To really get this you need to read some Timothy Leary or even better Terence McKenna.

Some of these mushrooms are obvious to us. We pick them all the time (at the supermarkets) but, unless through travel or gourmandising we are familiar with an extended menu of wild mushrooms picked in forests all over the world, our appreciation of their delights are a bit uniform.

In Hong Kong we are fortunate to see on a menu an extended range of oyster mushrooms, shiitake, matsutake, cloud ear (known in Europe as Jew's Ear) and a whole host of other delights and find some of them dried in shops all over town. Most of these are commercially grown.

Out in the wilds of Hong Kong there are a whole host of other species, some easily identifiable, others mysterious and alluring. You'll have to go a long way to find a book on identification, even further for a field guide. This is a pity because our environment is a rich one, is through reforestation getting richer and, if human encroachment is kept under control, is likely to continue to do so day by day. You can find mushrooms out there all year round.

The best time to see such things in the wild is immediately after rain -the heavier the better. The air is alive with fungal scents, the telltale indication that decay is all around us. Indeed, trees are infected with dormant spores whilst alive. These do the plants no harm and may even benefit by protecting the plant from some invasive and predatory organisms.

My first exciting foray into picking, identifying and eating these wild things occured when reading the section on mushrooms in Richard Maybe's Food for Free back in the 1980s. At that time we were living in Bolton with Brenda's mum and took the dogs for walks in the Moses Gate Country Park, a disused quarry turned good through a bit of reforestation, neglect and good management. Plunging through the alder, birch and hazel undergrowth, mushrooms were everywhere. I would take them home and lay them out on the dining room table until I could properly identify them using Roger Phillips' excellent Dorling Kindersley book, Mushrooms (which is about as good as it gets as a field guide). Unfortunately, I would occasionally leave them out overnight and the spores would seep through the newspaper and permeate (and hideously stain) the table much to my mother-in-law's anger. Oh dear. Such is a passion for mushrooms.

I still adore finding mushrooms. I left my mycology books back in the UK before we moved to HK thinking the species would not be the same. What a dummy! Thank goodness for on-line guides. They may not be as good as a portable as a good illustrated paperback, but they do the trick (sometimes). As for the pictures here, many of them a probably mislabelled but are as close as I could get them.