Country diary: An invasion of tiny fungi parachutists has landed overnight
They were here all along, as a mycelium of microscopically slender hyphae, down among the grassroots. Autumn is the fungal forager's season but fungi, as hyphae or spores, are everywhere, unseen, all the time. Occasionally, driven by the imperative to reproduce, their ramifying network of independent threads collaborates, producing spores in toadstools. Some, like these inkcaps, are ephemeral; others, like the dryad's saddle (Cerioporus squamosus) we'd been watching since spring, grow from teacup to tea-tray proportions, slowly digesting dead wood, taking months to reach maturity.
What changed overnight on this lawn, unseen, in the soil? Had several square yards of inkcap mycelium finally accumulated enough strategic reserves and sent signals fizzing along its underground network, with the order to send toadstools breaking through into the daylight? Was rain the trigger, a sudden downpour, softening sun-baked, droughted ground just enough for the fragile inkcaps to emerge?
Fungi, evolutionarily closer to animals than to plants, behave in mysterious ways. Some, like the bright orange nettle clustercup rust (Puccinia urticata) that we found distorting stems and leaves of stinging nettles along the lane here, live complicated lives, switching between different hosts. It spends half its life cycle on sedges, unnoticed, before producing its minute clustercups, brimming with spores, on nettles in the summer months.
The accolade for the most architecturally impressive fungus went to an immaculate group of oyster mushrooms, growing on fallen logs. In the silence of the beech wood there was a sense of awe when we peered under the tiered smooth grey brackets, with their radiating rows of gills, like the fan vaulting of a cathedral roof. But there was also a hint of menace: Pleurotus ostreatus is carnivorous. Tiny nematode worms, attracted to the perpetual moisture of wood softened by fungal rot, are paralysed by the toadstool's toxin, unable to escape its hyphae that invade and digest them.
Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
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The Guardian
19-07-2025
- The Guardian
Tim Dowling: the dog is destroying the lawn, but I need to catch her red-pawed
Shortly after its first birthday, the new dog suddenly starts digging giant holes in the lawn. I don't know why I imagined a year would be a cut-off point for a dog developing new unwanted behaviours. Why shouldn't an adult dog find a hobby? Anyway, these giant holes represent one of the key challenges of canine training: encouragement is easy; discouragement is hard. It's easy to teach a dog that peeing outside is good. It takes a lot longer to teach it that peeing inside is bad. Discouragement requires, at the very least, the possibility of connecting any negative reinforcement to the bad thing in question, which in this case proves impossible. When I discover a new hole in the morning, I call the dog out to the garden. She arrives instantly, tail wagging. 'Is this you?' I say, indicating the fresh, football-sized crater. The dog looks at me in perplexity. 'I don't even know why I'm asking,' I say. 'Of course it's you.' The dog stares expectantly, as if something fun might be about to happen. 'I will catch you in the act one day,' I say. 'And there will be consequences.' No one who's seen my lawn would dare to suggest I'm precious about it. I cut it infrequently and never bother with edging. At this time of year it's mostly brown patches and spreading weeds, and I don't care. But the holes are deep enough to represent a hazard, so I fill each new one and sprinkle grass seed over it. If I don't have enough soil, I top them up with espresso grounds. It would be fair to say none of this is working. It's a difficult time of year in the garden all-round. Half the crops in my pretend farm have failed, while the others present a problematic success. My wife comes out to my office shed while I'm staring at my raised beds. 'I'm going to the supermarket,' she says. 'Do you know if we need anything?' 'Don't buy courgettes,' I say. 'We have, like, eight.' 'Don't worry, I won't,' she says. I poisoned my family with toxic courgettes four years ago and it put all of them off courgettes, possibly for life. But I still grow them because they're easy, resulting in an annual glut. 'This year's ones are fine,' I say. 'You've actually eaten some already, without knowing.' 'Anything else?' she says. 'We have shitloads of radicchio,' I say. 'And one cucumber. Otherwise, as far as I know, we're out of everything.' Soon after my wife leaves, I discover that the everything we're out of includes milk. Instead of texting her, I go to the nearest shop. 'I'll be back in 10 minutes,' I say to the dog. 'Don't dig.' On my return I run into the middle one, who stopped by on his way back from work and found no one home. 'I ate your cucumber,' he says. 'The whole thing?' I say. 'It was delicious,' he says. I spend the rest of the afternoon watching from my desk as the dog lies on the grass chewing on an outdoor cushion. It's bad behaviour, but it's not a hole. If I am to apply negative reinforcement to the correct crime, timing is everything. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion An email pings into my inbox. I turn to read it, and then, grudgingly, answer it. When I turn back the dog is gone and there's a new hole alongside the gutted cushion. I examine the hole carefully – it looks to be one I have already filled and re-seeded once – before calling the dog's name. The dog appears at the kitchen door, yawning and stretching. 'Come here,' I say. The dog walks across the lawn and sits at my feet. 'What's this?' I say, pointing to the hole. The dog looks at my outstretched finger, and then at me. 'Your new hobby is unacceptable,' I say. 'I'd only just filled it in yesterday.' The dog tilts its head slightly, as if to say: is this about the cushion? 'This is about the hole,' I say. 'Whatever it is you're looking for in life, you won't find it a foot under the lawn.' The oldest one, home from work, walks into the kitchen. The dog runs in to greet him. 'Hello,' he says. 'Why is your nose covered in dirt?' 'You in tonight?' I say. 'I think so,' he says. 'What's for supper?' 'Dunno,' I say. 'Whatever mum brings back, plus courgettes.' 'Ugh,' he says. 'It was four years ago!' I say. 'Four years of everyone rejecting my courgettes!' 'And yet,' he says, 'you persist.'
The Guardian
19-07-2025
- The Guardian
Tim Dowling: the dog is destroying the lawn, but I need to catch her red-pawed
Shortly after its first birthday, the new dog suddenly starts digging giant holes in the lawn. I don't know why I imagined a year would be a cut-off point for a dog developing new unwanted behaviours. Why shouldn't an adult dog find a hobby? Anyway, these giant holes represent one of the key challenges of canine training: encouragement is easy; discouragement is hard. It's easy to teach a dog that peeing outside is good. It takes a lot longer to teach it that peeing inside is bad. Discouragement requires, at the very least, the possibility of connecting any negative reinforcement to the bad thing in question, which in this case proves impossible. When I discover a new hole in the morning, I call the dog out to the garden. She arrives instantly, tail wagging. 'Is this you?' I say, indicating the fresh, football-sized crater. The dog looks at me in perplexity. 'I don't even know why I'm asking,' I say. 'Of course it's you.' The dog stares expectantly, as if something fun might be about to happen. 'I will catch you in the act one day,' I say. 'And there will be consequences.' No one who's seen my lawn would dare to suggest I'm precious about it. I cut it infrequently and never bother with edging. At this time of year it's mostly brown patches and spreading weeds, and I don't care. But the holes are deep enough to represent a hazard, so I fill each new one and sprinkle grass seed over it. If I don't have enough soil, I top them up with espresso grounds. It would be fair to say none of this is working. It's a difficult time of year in the garden all-round. Half the crops in my pretend farm have failed, while the others present a problematic success. My wife comes out to my office shed while I'm staring at my raised beds. 'I'm going to the supermarket,' she says. 'Do you know if we need anything?' 'Don't buy courgettes,' I say. 'We have, like, eight.' 'Don't worry, I won't,' she says. I poisoned my family with toxic courgettes four years ago and it put all of them off courgettes, possibly for life. But I still grow them because they're easy, resulting in an annual glut. 'This year's ones are fine,' I say. 'You've actually eaten some already, without knowing.' 'Anything else?' she says. 'We have shitloads of radicchio,' I say. 'And one cucumber. Otherwise, as far as I know, we're out of everything.' Soon after my wife leaves, I discover that the everything we're out of includes milk. Instead of texting her, I go to the nearest shop. 'I'll be back in 10 minutes,' I say to the dog. 'Don't dig.' On my return I run into the middle one, who stopped by on his way back from work and found no one home. 'I ate your cucumber,' he says. 'The whole thing?' I say. 'It was delicious,' he says. I spend the rest of the afternoon watching from my desk as the dog lies on the grass chewing on an outdoor cushion. It's bad behaviour, but it's not a hole. If I am to apply negative reinforcement to the correct crime, timing is everything. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion An email pings into my inbox. I turn to read it, and then, grudgingly, answer it. When I turn back the dog is gone and there's a new hole alongside the gutted cushion. I examine the hole carefully – it looks to be one I have already filled and re-seeded once – before calling the dog's name. The dog appears at the kitchen door, yawning and stretching. 'Come here,' I say. The dog walks across the lawn and sits at my feet. 'What's this?' I say, pointing to the hole. The dog looks at my outstretched finger, and then at me. 'Your new hobby is unacceptable,' I say. 'I'd only just filled it in yesterday.' The dog tilts its head slightly, as if to say: is this about the cushion? 'This is about the hole,' I say. 'Whatever it is you're looking for in life, you won't find it a foot under the lawn.' The oldest one, home from work, walks into the kitchen. The dog runs in to greet him. 'Hello,' he says. 'Why is your nose covered in dirt?' 'You in tonight?' I say. 'I think so,' he says. 'What's for supper?' 'Dunno,' I say. 'Whatever mum brings back, plus courgettes.' 'Ugh,' he says. 'It was four years ago!' I say. 'Four years of everyone rejecting my courgettes!' 'And yet,' he says, 'you persist.'
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- The Guardian
Country diary: An invasion of tiny fungi parachutists has landed overnight
There were none here yesterday, and by the end of tomorrow they'll have deliquesced and disappeared, but for now the neatly mown grass under our feet was studded with 2in-tall parasol inkcaps (Parasola plicatilis). They looked like an invasion of tiny parachutists; in reality they'd risen from the underworld. They were here all along, as a mycelium of microscopically slender hyphae, down among the grassroots. Autumn is the fungal forager's season but fungi, as hyphae or spores, are everywhere, unseen, all the time. Occasionally, driven by the imperative to reproduce, their ramifying network of independent threads collaborates, producing spores in toadstools. Some, like these inkcaps, are ephemeral; others, like the dryad's saddle (Cerioporus squamosus) we'd been watching since spring, grow from teacup to tea-tray proportions, slowly digesting dead wood, taking months to reach maturity. What changed overnight on this lawn, unseen, in the soil? Had several square yards of inkcap mycelium finally accumulated enough strategic reserves and sent signals fizzing along its underground network, with the order to send toadstools breaking through into the daylight? Was rain the trigger, a sudden downpour, softening sun-baked, droughted ground just enough for the fragile inkcaps to emerge? Fungi, evolutionarily closer to animals than to plants, behave in mysterious ways. Some, like the bright orange nettle clustercup rust (Puccinia urticata) that we found distorting stems and leaves of stinging nettles along the lane here, live complicated lives, switching between different hosts. It spends half its life cycle on sedges, unnoticed, before producing its minute clustercups, brimming with spores, on nettles in the summer months. The accolade for the most architecturally impressive fungus went to an immaculate group of oyster mushrooms, growing on fallen logs. In the silence of the beech wood there was a sense of awe when we peered under the tiered smooth grey brackets, with their radiating rows of gills, like the fan vaulting of a cathedral roof. But there was also a hint of menace: Pleurotus ostreatus is carnivorous. Tiny nematode worms, attracted to the perpetual moisture of wood softened by fungal rot, are paralysed by the toadstool's toxin, unable to escape its hyphae that invade and digest them. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
