In groups we are strong! Sulphur Tuft, Puffballs and more 🍄🍄🍄

Another Friday, another mushroom!

Or rather plenty of mushrooms today… masses of them 🤩

Picture-wise there are 15 of them, but scroll on and you’ll know what I mean by masses. It’s like finding those riches in my recurring dreams article from yesterday. Either there are none in sight for a long time or there is such abundance of them, that I don’t know at which group to point my camera 😂

Let’s start with the smallest and cutest groups though.

Though comfortably tucked inside a tree trunk.

Even though I know that the sole purpose of fungi is to recycle dead matter I still get quite amazed when I see the cute groups of mushrooms small and big growing out of a dead tree trunk.

To me it seems like some invisible power has placed them perfectly in that nest for the sole pleasure of my eyes to experience such cuteness.

That statement is not even that far off the truth, which is that Earth is covered by the invisible net of myceliar network and where the conditions met the requirements (like yummy, decomposing tree trunk), fungi can and will grow.

Even in my neglected pot of plants in the garden!

I’ll be honest… I’m not that great with the names of fungi that I’m not likely to eat. I scrolled through my Shroomify app to see if I can find anything that looks like those I took pictures of and those next few pictures might or might not be of Suphur Tuft fungi.

While trying to choose which pictures to share with #FungiFriday community by @ewkaw today, I was looking for common themes that I can group them by and this group was grouped by the ‘group’ criteria 😂

We started from the smallest groups, which are always my preference in life in general. In bigger groups I’m a bit lost I guess, although as long as I don’t need to interact with everyone, I’m ok. Like if they’re just passing by me on the street 😉

Back to mushrooms though! Check out this group… size overload. I mean how do they arrange themselves like this? One growing next to another, on top and bellow another and in between so many others. Pure mastermind in action… momma nature at her best 😍

But really… my favourite way to capture them is around the trees. Just such a cute sight. They bend their legs around each other and poking their heads into the sky.

Fungi are really quite fascinating for me.

But hey, not all groups make for pretty pictures. Some show a tragedy of a periously happg family.

This group wasn’t very lucky. They picked a spot a bit too close to the footpath and someone’s foot destroyed their dreams of a beatiful future.

And then I stumbled across THOSE!

Even more tightly entagled group of not the prettiest fungi on Earth, but fascinating nonetheless.

Kinda like masses of pancakes I’d say 😉

Pretty or not, the shere masses of them got me utterly excited! If only my camera would be able to show exactly what I’ve seen! Yet the cameras as great as they are, can not replicate a human eye and overall experience. The colours, the light, the smell, the feeling… you can only get the full picture by experiencing it first hand… in this case being in the forest.

Still, we try. We get out of the house for a breath of fresh air, a bit of exercise and we capture those moments the best we can, so we can share them with others as well as generation that come after us.

You still here, my reader? If so, drop me a comment with ‘code blue’ for 1 unit of HSBI. I like sharing these with people and I also like seeing if anyone reads between pretty pictures too.

And back to mushrooms again… bear with me, just 3 more pictures to come 😉

From this perspective the ugly fungi group looks actually quite cute again. I mean what’s with us humans being so attached to ugly and pretty, good and bad, light and dark and why is one always better than the other?

I’ve been listening to some mighty interesting postcasts these days. I’ll write more on that subject another day, but the author, Michael Singer, asks interesting questions. Like ‘who decided whether you like it or not? YOU did.’ The more things we decide we don’t like, the more negative emotions we attach to those things and the more we make ourselves suffer.

Not that I suffer from seeing ugly mushrooms by the way. I love them all and I always get a little excited when I see any 😁

Like puffballs. These are edible and many people like them, but I find them a little tasteless, so I very rarely pick those. They’re quite interesting objects for pictures due to their unusual structure and I have taken plenty for a separate post, but this little bunch made it here, cause… you know… it’s another group 😁

And since we talked a lot about ‘ugly’ mushrooms, let’s end this post on a pretty note. While these might not be the prettiest fungi in the world, the setting and perspective makes for a very pretty picture, don’t you thing?

Until next time 💙