The magic of mushrooms: how they connect the plant world

After years in the wilderness, fungi are finally getting the attention they deserve from gardeners, scientists, designers and doctors

Joe Perkins, like most gardeners, has typically been more animated by what's going on above the ground than below it. The quality of the soil was important, no question, but what was really going on down there felt mysterious and impenetrable. As for fungi, it usually meant one thing in a garden, and that wasn't good news.

On a domestic level, our relationship and understanding of fungi in the past has very much been that it's something about decay, it's about disease, and it's something that we don't particularly want in our gardens," says Perkins, a 45-year-old landscape architect based in Sussex, who won three awards at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2019. It's fair to say that, as gardeners, we've not always fully understood - and I still don't - the importance of these systems."