The Joy of Sticks

One unexpected consequence of our current circumstances is that my garden – the location for Michael Blencowe's daily 'Corona Wildlife Diary' – has become ever so slightly famous.

It's been a joy to see people sharing stories of life, wild life, continuing on around us. But when the camera turned to my back garden, I confess to a sudden and powerful empathy with Hyacinth Bucket and that matter of 'Keeping Up Appearances'. Because – with time taken up by work and other interests – our garden had become a bit of a mess.

So it was that I found myself on the first day of the bank holiday intent on tidying up the 'vegetable patch'.

 

Last year's Fennel has stood here all winter; its stems now well and truly dead. So I thought I'd start by clearing these away. It took longer than I thought as, while I was chopping them into bits to go in the garden waste bin, I got rather distracted by the tiny bumps and speckles which adorned them.

The thin stems in the Fennel's upper reaches were most intriguing, being covered in a smattering of tiny fuzzy-looking specks. So some of these were saved from the garden waste bin and came into the house with me. I popped them in a box with some damp kitchen roll and waited to see what would happen.

Here's one of those stems after it's moistened up a bit. You might just be able to make out those fascinating specks?

Another hour or two passed, while I figured out how to change a light bulb in the stereomicroscope.

It was worth it, because these aren't just any old specks. They are in fact beautiful soft grey cup funguses fringed with crystal-white hairs.

At the highest level of magnification, I could just make out some tiny square clusters of dots – a telltale sign that what I'm looking at here is a fungus which holds its spores out on prongs [sterigmata]: it's a basidiomycete.

I think what I've got here might be Lachnella alboviolascens; but there may be similar species and I haven't yet managed to track down a key.

The authors of 'Fungi of Temperate Europe' describe Lachnella as "a genus of dessication-tolerant cyphelloids... In dry weather the fruit bodies close and form small, hairy balls." You can actually see this in action under the microscope – these photos were taken over the course of about 15 minutes.

Those weren't the only interesting specks on the Fennel.

The thick stems were covered in tiny black bumps which – taking a lead from 'Ellis & Ellis' – I think might be Leptosphaeria libanotis, with a "depressed-globose" shape.

I can't work out if the even-tinier specks shown here [TOP] with the Lachnella for scale [BOTTOM] is a baby version of the Lachnella, or something different. Might need to get the slide microscope out...

Anyway, I think we've established why the garden's such a mess. And maybe messy's just fine for funguses.

For the record
Date: 11 April 2020
Location: My garden

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