Country diary: magical mushrooms spark the children’s imagination

Durham University Botanic Garden: Curious fungi open a gate to the mysteries of mycology

Before I retired from university teaching, I brought undergraduates to this valley at the bottom of the botanic garden to demonstrate the rudiments of mycology. It's a perfect location for a fungal foray: deciduous beech and oak woodland on one side of a small stream, a conifer plantation on the other, with plentiful fallen timber.

The site is managed for mycological diversity, allowing dead branches to decay where they fall, entering an afterlife where wave after wave of fungal hyphae slowly reduce them to humus. As that great woodsman Oliver Rackham once said: "A horizontal tree - alive or dead - is at least as good a habitat as an upright one."