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IN THE GARDEN there are drifts of small brown Puffball fungi, alongside the garden shed and at the end of the herb bed. They are browner than shown in the field guide, but I think that they are Lycoperdon pyriforme, pyriforme meaning pear-shaped. Although they emerge directly from the ground they are, so the field guide tells me, actually growing from buried wood. They are edible when young. Some creature, perhaps a vole, has nibbled into some of them to reveal the white centre.
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In the wood by the stream, delicate little parasol toadstools are growing from a carpet of bright green moss on the bough of a crack willow. The green sporangia, the spore capsules, of the moss are growing on the end of wiry stems.
In the park, polypore toadstools grow where the stump of a small tree has rotted away. One of the toadstools has been eaten away until only a brown spongy mass remains. The larvae, which I think must be those of a species of fungus gnat, are wandering around, rearing up on their stumpy 'hind-legs' as if looking for the next toadstool to devour.
We pause by a marshy triangle of land tucked in between the lane and a derelict railway. Someone has put up a notice declaring it a 'Nature Conservation Area.' The little pond is a mass of duckweed. It's resemblance to a solid painted floor is improved by what appear to be a series of dirty footprints stepping across it.