She would then take them home and burn them “in deepest secrecy on the drawing room fire with the door locked - because of the morals of the maids.”Īs Sheldrake notes, her exploits would have spread the stinkhorns’ spores far more effectively than any number of the flies that, attracted by their stench, usually do this work. In Entangled Life, Sheldrake describes the horror stirred in Gwen Raverat’s Aunt Etty by the pungent and suggestively shaped stinkhorn mushroom, Phallus impudicus (Raverat, the engraver and memoirist, was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin).Įtty would, Raverat said in 1952, “sniff her way” through her local wood, armed with a special stick with which she used to poke the stinkhorns into her basket. They thought mushrooms came up where lightning struck - that you could tell which one was going to kill you by boiling it with a wooden spoon,” Sheldrake said.Įven now, the non-mycologist often experiences a strange ambivalence when it comes to fungi, one that can encompass both disgust and fear, and a powerful attraction there is a reason why Raymond Briggs called his smelliest character Fungus the Bogeyman. Through the Middle Ages and into the 18th century, people had no grasp at all of it. Linnaeus described it as chaos, a scandal of art. “Fungal taxonomy has been a total mess for ages. “It’s as if we could only see the flowers and fruit of a tree, and not the rest of it: its leaves, stems and roots.” Outside science, many people, if not most, associate fungi only with mushrooms. This had a huge impact - if you’re not training researchers, it will be neglected.”

Mycologists were put in a corner of the plant sciences department, rather than in their own fungal sciences department. “Fungi weren’t seen as their own kingdom of life until the 1960s. “There is an entrenched disciplinary bias,” he said. The first is straightforward: Only recently have technologies been available that allow scientists fully to investigate the fungal world to open up the hidden realms that lie beneath us, invisible to the eye.

Merlin sheldrake mushrooms