Awakening

Last Sunday, I walked up our long garden with little Margot. On the way, we passed the stump of the old horse chestnut tree. It was felled four years ago and I now use it as an extra bird table. I was quite efficient at removing any signs of new growth as we did not want the tree to grow back via side shoots.

On Tuesday afternoon, I took our kitchen  caddy bin up to the large compost bins that are situated near the top of the garden. Again this involved passing by the horse chestnut tree stump. Within those forty eight hours, something amazing had happened.

A lot of mushrooms had burst forth from the earth - dozens of them in clusters. We had never seen fungi there before and I am sure it was connected with the dying tree stump and its roots that no doubt reach out like tentacles beneath the soil's surface.

Perhaps the air temperature and the autumn moisture in the air had ignited this sudden burgeoning of life. And it's funny how this should have happened just as I was beginning to read the book I recently retrieved from a drystone wall - "Entangled Life". It is all about fungi and the secret worlds it occupies across the globe.

Our fungi is I believe a common honey fungus. It is especially connected with dead tree root systems and can be quite destructive in any garden - perhaps spreading to other susceptible plants. There are no known chemical treatments that can successfully destroy honey fungi. You either live with it or dig out old tree roots and stumps before burning them. Some gardeners even bury rubberised barriers like pond liners in the ground to prevent the potential spread of honey fungi but there's no way I will be doing that. I prefer to let nature simply takes its course.