The power of mushrooms to kill or cure

Weird, stinky and occasionally deadly: not everyone can make heart room for mushrooms. But Richard Fortey, a palaeontologist who recently retired from his post at the Natural History Museum after more than three decades’ service, has always found ‘pleasure and perplexity’ in the ‘alien’ world of fungi.

In his lovably nerdish 2021 memoir A Curious Boy, Fortey credited the Observer’s Guide to Common Fungi with setting him on the path to a passionate life scientific. As the uncoordinated son of a sporty father (a champion fly fisherman who owned several fishing shops), the young naturalist got his teenage kicks stalking riverbanks and studying the strange organisms he found there. In 2006, he was even briefly credited with identifying a mushroom previously unknown to science. It later transpired that it was a known species that had migrated to the UK from Japan alongside its invasive host, Japanese knotweed.  

Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind is an informative, anecdote-jammed treat for amateur mycologists like me. I love mushrooms, but have felt the lack of a well-written book on a subject, which seems to have fallen between the two cultures: scientists stick, bone dry, to the differences between the 14,000-plus species, while artier authors prefer to eulogise only a few. As both a beautiful, witty writer with a magpie eye for a good yarn and a rigorous scientist, Fortey fills that gap with this delectably accessible but comprehensive book.

Like Fortey, I’m clumsy and geeky. But on the fungal forays I began taking in my early twenties, I shared the hunter’s rush he describes, prowling through the woods at dawn with a mushroom knife, brush and basket. Although a predator of stationary prey, you still switch up your senses to take the right trail, the leaves beneath your feet, listening for the flies at your ankles and tuning into the scents rising from the soil that range from honey to Camembert.