Under the pines and broadleaf trees in Rowney Warren Wood, the renowned Kew Gardens mycologist Dr Richard Dennis led an autumn fungus foray back in 1950. It was a dry, sunny day after much wet weather, and the group recorded 105 species, including one – Naucoria jennyae – new to Britain. Now, 74 years later, we’re enjoying the diversity of fungi that still thrive in the woods.
Butter caps are scattered through the pines. Each has a coffee-coloured umbo (or central bump) in a cold cream sea, slicked with an oily sheen that gives them the unsavoury sobriquet “greasy toughshanks”. As pines give way to deciduous woodland, milkcaps appear in abundance, their name referring to the latex that exudes from the gills when the flesh is damaged.
