Wrinkled Peach

After all the excitement of the party, it was good to have a couple of quiet hours in the autumnal dampness of Raveley Wood. Pete was working, surveying for craneflies and species associated with fungi, leaf litter and dead wood. I spent my time photographing the fungi, which at last are becoming more plentiful. By far the most abundant species was Fairie's Bonnets Coprinella disseminata, with troops numbering into the hundreds covering many tree stumps.

I'm not sure this was the best image of the day, but it was the most interesting species for me. It's known, very aptly, as the Wrinkled Peach Rhodotus palmatus, and the first thing that caught my eye was the delicate blushing pink colour. You can see that the cap surface is gently wrinkled, and this becomes more pronounced as it ages. It grows on fallen elm and at one time was quite rare, but has become much more frequent since Dutch elm-disease hit, especially in the midlands and south-east England. I've never seen it before, probably because most of the woods that I visit regularly don't have a lot of elm in them.

We returned home in the mid-afternoon, to find Chris, Lizzy and Alex in the living room, all looking somewhat jaded. They'd finally got to bed about 5am and hadn't had a lot of sleep - Lizzy was also suffering the after effects of the punch, which was stronger than she'd realised. Chris and Lizzy bought us all a Chinese take-away in the evening, as a thank you for organising the party, and we followed this with an orange sorbet made with some of the left over dry-ice.

We than had lots of fun making screaming noises using dry ice and metal cutlery, blowing up balloons and making huge heaps of carbon dioxide bubbles. It took me back to our home-educating days when science was fun - before the dreaded, tedious GCSE's made it dull...