#earthball

Fungi

Species: Ghost Fungus, Hairy Trumpet and Onion Earthball (Taken over a month or so)

London, UK, October 2022

Common earthball (Scleroderma citrinum)

North American mushroom hunters circle August on their calendars, when the sheer proliferation of fungi reaches its peak in the mid to late summer woods. In a healthy Appalachian forest, fungi emerge in a mind-boggling procession of forms and colors from every square inch of dead and living matter: patches of leaf litter, the mossy crooks and crannies of boulders, dead tree stumps, and nearly everything else fixed in place. And underlying all these magical fruiting bodies is an extraordinary network of filaments (”hyphae”) that binds all life in the forest, metabolizing proteins into soluble nitrates essential to plant life and even sending signals to divert resources to plants in distress: the Mycelium Network . Indeed, a forest cannot exist without fungi.