Sunny day in Garth
We last visited Garth about a week before the leaves started to turn into Autumn. On the way back we stopped by the edge of a wood, south of Aberfeldy, and through the boundary fence, suddenly noticed the largest ceps (porcini) mushroom I have seen for a long time! We dived into the woods and came home with a fantastic collection of ceps, birch boletes, stump puffballs and blushers.
I was worried it was too late in the season. Two weeks before there had been a fantastic crop of amythyst deceivers in our beech woods along the gorge, but a week later I could not find a single one! If we get the Garth woodlands we could innoculate old tree trunks with mushroom spore. You can buy packs of rawl plugs that have been innoculated with (for example) oyster mushrooms. You drill small holes into the rooten or dead wood of a log or stump, insert rawl plugs, and wait!
This year our mushroom feasts have included:
Porcini (ceps)
Amythyst Deceivers are edible
Amythst Deceivers
Chanterelles
Blushers
Birch Boletes
Shaggy Inkcaps
Puffballs
Stump Puffballs
Tawny Grisettes
This is an interesting interpretation for the presence of meadowsweet pollens recovered from Bronze Age burials within the UK. The evidence of ‘floral tribute’ has generally been interpreted as a practical measure to suppress the smell of a decaying corpse interred in the warmer summer months when meadowsweet is in bloom.
It would be interesting to see what other pollens are present in the archaeological record from burial sites and which ones could have made a contribution to the prehistoric medicine chest.