A trip down Memory Card Lane ... with extra mushrooms

I've had a productive weekend digging around in ancient computer files, memory cards, assorted electronic devices, emails and more and found endless photos of my early days out and about with friends before I started blogging. Some amazing finds that made me so happy to rediscover; I got quite giddy with the memories! 

All the electronic stuff that characterises our century has redundancy built in and you never get everything in one place before that device, format or accessory gets out of date. It's an endless fight to get one comprehensive photo album together.

I shall write occasional posts about my life before this blog, when actually most of my photos as a TGirl were taken! I've done some of that before but now I can add extras. It was when life was at its best. You know, when you accept that you can live as the woman you always felt you were. Like this picture which I have just rediscovered and which is one of the nicest photos of me ever taken and shows how relaxed and confident I felt living my life as a woman. 

 

 

This was at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London. Today, in the light of my last post where I linked to other posts about visiting Kew Gardens, I will attach more photos from that beautiful place that was a big part of my outdoor life as a TGirl. And, in the light of past comments, talk about going mushrooming, with the help of the scientists at Kew who specialise in mycology, the study of the vast realm of life that is the fungus kingdom. Obviously, my main interest is someone who eats a lot! But there's more to mushrooms than you might think. 

As I've mentioned before, although I'd been out away from home before, in June 2010 I walked out of my own front door presenting as female for the first time ever. And after a long walk I ended up at Kew Gardens. I had a season ticket, but obviously in my official male name and gender, so the first interaction I ever had with another person in the real world as Sue was to persuade the woman on the gate that I was the person on the ticket. She eventually shrugged and let me in. It was easier to get into Kew Gardens in the days when you paid just a penny to the guardian on the gate. (Yes, until the 1980s the entry fee was one penny and had been for 200 years or so. It's now £25 entry on the gate - inflation over the last 45 years of 250000%. Thanks, Mrs Thatcher.)

I took some selfies but I had no tripod or timer so they are all too close-up and horrible and you have no idea I'm at Kew so I will never post them. The next year I went to Kew for a picnic with Joanne and Petra and two of my favourite pictures emerged. One of me standing by the fountain in the back garden at Kew Palace, and one of me with Petra in "Queen's Garden", which we thought was very apt! You've seen these before buy, hey, they're favourites.

 

My visit with Dee was just a couple of weeks after this. She's described our picnic in detail in her blog here. This is me standing outside the iconic Palm House ...

 ... and with some fancy chickens ...

 ... and by the Gingko biloba or maidenhair tree that is such an ancient species that it still has separate male and female plants. But not at Kew because when it was first planted in the eighteenth century they weren't aware of that feature and grafted male and female plants together, thus creating a hybrid tree which you could consider, in some ways, an intersex or even trans tree.

Dee and me in the Japanese Garden... 
 

And me in the garden house at the palace again ...

I still have that skirt. It's the same one you see in the background photo to my blog, which was taken a few weeks after this, at Painshill Park at the other end of the county of Surrey from Kew. And the shoes, which I no longer have. Maybe the T-shirt is the same one! So few ideas ... just like a real woman lol! Very sadly, I no longer have the handbag which was a real favourite but, being made of faux leather, it eventually disintegrated. I think I still have the black cardigan somewhere.

Many thanks to my lovely friend Dee for her excellent photography, and for inspiring this post. 

I went to Kew Gardens a few times after this en femme but I have no further photos from those trips. 

I also went to Kew a couple of times for the "fungus forays" with the head of mycology, Dr Brian Spooner. I mention this as I talked about hunting for mushrooms for food in my last post and this elicited quite a few comments. With its exotic collections and the symbiosis between the fungal kingdom and the plant kingdom that results in fungi being inadvertently imported with plants, Kew has some amazing fungi as well as plants, if you know where to look. 

As foodies, we're after edible toadstools, which are the characteristic bulbous fruiting bodies of the fungus that scatter its spores. The fungus itself, if you find it in woodland, which is where most edible species come from, is not the toadstool you see but is chiefly a mycelium or network of strands called hyphae that run underground, through the matter it consumes: leaf litter, soil, dead wood, etc. Other fungi consume other stuff: that old slice of bread or cheese or pot of jam, that dead animal or even that living one (ouch!). Some fungi are lovable, like brewer's yeast, some damaging, like dry rot, or candida (ew!). So we eat the reproductive parts of some fungi, rather like we eat the fruits of some plants.

It's hard to see the actual mycelium and its hyphae as they're buried within the fungus's food, but we caught sight of a black bootstrap once just on the surface that was the hypha of a tough woodland fungus. And not all fruiting bodies look like fairy toadstools. Some are like birds' nests that let the raindrops scatter the "eggs", some are like antlers or alien tentacles, some like rubbery earlobes and some ... well, the genus name is Phallus so have a guess. Here are some of the weirder types for you, all of them spotted at Kew ...

Crucibulum laeve, a bird's nest fungus

Calocera viscosa, or yellow stagshorn

Auricularia auricula-judae, or jelly ear. The Latin means Jew's ear because the fungus grows on elder wood, which is the tree that some traditions say that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from after betraying Jesus.

Clathrus archeri, or octopus stinkhorn, erupting from its "eggs" like Ridley Scott's alien.

Mutinus caninus, or dog stinkhorn, one of the many Phallales. Mutinus was a Roman fertility god. There are lots of common names for the phalloid fungi and I won't repeat them here!

As a child I used to hunt for mushrooms with my grandfather, or with youngsters my age. The best are found in early autumn in deciduous woodland after rain followed by a few days of sun. Some hunts were disappointing - maybe you'd get just a few young honey fungi (Armillaria mellea) after hours of tramping in steep woods; other trips brought rich, easy pickings that earned congratulations from the grown-ups and provided lunch for a dozen people, such as a big bagful of tall, broad parasol mushrooms (Macrolepiota procera) that have an intoxicating smell of hazelnuts and the caps of which are delicious battered and fried.

If you want to pick your own in public woodland, first check that you are allowed to by local laws. Field mushrooms may need the permission of farmers or other landowners. You MUST learn the few species that are deadly (or unsuitable for eating because they do weird things to your head ... unless you're seeking that effect, of course). In Europe, pickers can usually get their hauls checked by experts that local police stations or hospitals employ, depending on which country you're in. If you've picked a poisonous one by mistake, throw your whole haul away. If in doubt, leave the thing where it is. 

 

Amanita phalloides, the Death Cap. Just one can kill you in slow and unpleasant ways. Just ask the Roman emperor Claudius I who had one slipped into his dinner so that his charming stepson Nero could come to power. If you survive, your liver and kidneys won't ever work properly again. You must be able to recognise this one if you go out mushrooming. 

Really, the lethal ones are almost all from the genuses Amanita and Lepiota - they're not called things like Death Cap and Destroying Angel for nothing. Buy a guidebook with a key to identification and learn the bad ones, and carry your book into the woods with you with your collecting boxes or baskets. 

Enjoy the good ones. Remember to give them a shake as you pick them so some spores fall out and, with luck, start a new crop. Here are some nice "penny buns" or "porcini" (Boletus edulis) I bought last year and turned into a stew. I've recently had them in a sauce with tagliolini, thin strips of freshly-made pasta, in my favourite local restaurant and they were delicious beyond belief.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been unimpressed with the rather yellowing, bug-chewed porcini in my supermarket this week and haven't bought any. Best wait for market day and get some fresher ones from a stall even if they cost more. 

Sue x