The fear has ended: the mushrooms are coming back! Two years of frightening summer drought resulted in very few mushrooms, but now, with rains throughout the summer and abundant rainfall these past few weeks, the forest floor is again sending up so many mushrooms, so many different types, that I’m feeling a mushroom energy I thought was lost.

On a foray this week I found a small gathering of Hydnellum. At first I thought they were H. aurantiacum, as I would expect to find more of these around, but then I noticed the reddish tinge on the cap. These had to be H. peckii, the lovely mushrooms that start out white with beads of red liquid on their surfaces. Hence the name Strawberries and Cream.

Sure enough, when I sliced the stem vertically, the inside of the stem was dark brown, not the orange of H. aurantiacum (Latin for orange-coloured).

It’s early days for these little toothed fungi, but I’m encouraged to see these at least, after a couple of seasons of very few (or none at all) Hydnellum. More to report in the next few weeks.