Photograph: Paula Vigus
One day the forest floor may be filled with leaf litter, soft decomposing logs and tiny tree saplings – the next, the logs flush with gilled oyster mushrooms, rivers of brightly coloured waxgills run along the ground, or puffballs – white orbs, as big as footballs, that suddenly appear in the undergrowth.
Such is the curious world of New Zealand’s fungi, which like the nation’s flora and fauna, have evolved in isolation into more than 20,000 unusual and endemic species. Most fungi are too small to be visible, and of those that you can see, most aren’t mushrooms – they’re lichen, moulds, mildews, rusts and smuts.
