Mushrooms are tricky critters. The line between deadly poisonous and delightfully edible is a vague and fluffy one.

Take the Common or Shaggy Ink Cap as an example, classified in some quarters as an excellent edible it also takes centre stage on our poster of “Some Poisonous Fungi” and is tagged as “dangerous when consumed either 48 hours before or 48 hours after, drinking alcohol”. With a 4 day alcohol free window required, I would say that makes it permanently poisonous for me.
Mind you, it could be just what I need to keep me on the straight narrow in the sober run up to the Great North Wetsuit fitting escapade.

The Death Cap or (Amanita phalloides) is deadly poisonous, apparently responsible for 80% of all mushroom related deaths but it is damn hard to distinguish between that and the edible sister mushroom the Tawny Grisette or Amanita fulva. [Actually my book says it is responsible for 80% of deaths (full stop) and I added the mushroom related bit as I'm pretty sure mushrooms haven't knocked heart disease and cancer off the top rungs of purgatory.]
I’ve labelled the central fungus in this collection as a death cap but have since decided it is a tawny grisette. Just as well we didn’t bring it home or I may be tempted to test out my identification skills in a dodgy roulette style.

I’m afraid my allotment mushroom logs have not sprung into glorious fungal abundance, they remain as two derelict stumps with a stippling of doweling. This colourful collection were snapped on our weekend trip around Longshaw Estate in the Peak District.

We were there in search of the much sought after chip butty of Grindleford caff fame but got rather sidetracked by the mushroomy loveliness of the landscape. We weren’t the only ones, every time I squatted down to gill level, the park warden would pop out of nowhere to bagsy my find. He was supposedly taking a couple of baby wardens on a navigational skills walk but it seemed to have morphed into a tracking skills workshop.

I’m not really complaining, admittedly I don’t like being approached from the rear, especially when I have it partially exposed and facing skywards, but he did prove to be rather useful on the mushroom identification front. I’d be able to rattle off the names of all of them if only either of us had half a memory between us. As it is, we came home with only a vague recollection of names beginning with R and have spent the last 2 days ferreting through every fungal book to hand.

Here’s what we’ve come up with, in a very unreliable fashion, starting in the centre and then going clockwise from top left:
1. Tawny Grisette (Amanita fulva) or possibly the Death Cap, tasty or deadly – you take your choices.
2 & 13. Earthball
3 & 4. Dunno
5. Beechwood Sickener (Russula mairei)
6. Green cracked russula (Russula virescens)????
7. Sulphur tuft or honey fungus, another one of those edible or not choices.
8 & 9. Shaggy Ink Cap
10. Some form of Boletus
11 & 12. Possibly another form of overblown boletus