This is one of many pages describing plants and animal life
that we have in our garden. In many cases, we don't know what they are. Comments welcome.
By default the photos on this page are relatively small (“thumbnails“). Click
on them to get progressively larger photos.
We have a surprising number of mushrooms in the garden. I think I can identify some of
them.
Agaricus campestris
These ones are some kind of Agaricus. I had thought that they're
Agaricus campestris,
but on at least one occasion I found them going slightly yellow when drying up, which
suggests that they might be the poisonous
Agaricus xanthodermus,
(or that I have more than one kind in the garden). I've eaten them and lived to tell the
tale, so if they're poisonous it's marginal.
This one looks quite similar to the Agaricus, and it grows in the same area as them,
but when it's small the head has this strange angular shape. Maybe that's just part of
where it grew. I didn't take any more photos, but when it was mature it looked much more
like the Agaricus.
These popped up under a pine tree in late February
2008. Unlike the Agaricus varieties that we've had in the past, they grow in
dry conditions and stay in much better condition until they dry out. Spent some time
investigating them; the best guess seems to be that they're something
like Macrolepiota
procera, also known as “parasol mushroom”,
or Macrolepiota
rhacoides, both eminently edible. But the danger exists that they might
be Chlorophyllum
molybdites, which are poisonous. As the name might suggest, that mushroom goes
greenish in old age and has a greenish spore print. Grabbed an old mushroom for a spore
print. The gills certainly weren't greenish, but it was obviously too old for a spore
print;
I've never seen anything like this one before. It appears to have something flower-like at
the top, so maybe it's not a mushroom at all. But it grows very quickly in horse dung, and
apart from that looks like a mushroom.
