Story & photo: Graham Jones
On 26th October Ziggy Senkans, the Sheffield City Council bio-diversity officer, led a walk to look at the varieties of fungi in Burngreave Cemetery. It was an inspiring walk on a beautiful autumn afternoon. We saw an amazing range of fungi and Ziggy’s specialist knowledge was put to the test as he managed to identify them all. Fungi come in a range of shapes, sizes and colours with uncounted thousands of species in the UK alone.
They range from the microscopic to the massive Armillaria ostoya of Oregon which is the largest organism in the world. It occupies the equivalent of 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometres). The fungi have such lovely names too: nitrous bonnet, brown rollrims, honey fungus, snowy waxcap, and ugly milkcap – to name but a few.
Of course, some are poisonous to humans, and others will cause you stomach problems; so don’t go out picking them for a veggie fry up if you don’t really know what you’re doing! Some are also fatal to trees.
I found out that there’s much more to fungi than than the contents of a tin of mushroom soup.
