A myriad of mushrooms 🍄

[The alternative title I almost used: A fistful of fungus finds]

On our day off last week, Ed and I went out for an early morning walk on Dartmoor to hunt for mushrooms! We headed to the same spot we went to last year in the hope of spotting another magical fly agaric (amanita muscaria) 🤓 spoiler: we really hit the jackpot! As promised, here is the resulting fungus-photo-heavy post...

We brought our mushroom identification book along with us, admittedly we were too busy exploring to study it whilst we were out though:

A fun guy 😉

Autumnal reflections...

Although we were very much enjoying our outing, we were a bit disappointed that the coveted fly agaric was alluding us. We decided to cross the road, heading out of the woods and into the open, I followed a path through a gap in the undergrowth and...there she was! Our first little red beauty:

A little piece of Devon heaven.

We thought we were lucky seeing just one of these fairytale toadstools, but a little way ahead we stumbled across many more. It was so exciting, like we'd found buried treasure! 

They come in many shapes and sizes, and different shades from orange to dark crimson 🍄

One larger than a hand, some smaller than a fingertip:

Trying to blend in with the gorse 💛

We were making our way back to the car when we spotted another patch of fly agaric, just across the road from were we were parked! It was funny to think that if we'd just started our walk in a different direction we would have seen all these straight away:

Mmm looks just like a toasted marshmallow!

Possibly my favourite photo I took 😍

Hidden in amongst the ferns...

We ended our walk with a flask of coffee on a bench overlooking the autumnal landscape turning from green to brown. (You can see a photo of the bench and view in my post from last year!) 

Hope you enjoyed seeing our many fungus finds, we really must sit down with that book and try to identify them all! 😄