Big enough to eat your dinner off

Fordingbridge, New Forest The giant funnel fungus is widespread but not common, and this find is worthy of note. It's good to have friends who use their eyes

"You've really got to see them," he said excitedly as he came into the coffee morning. "They're huge, bigger than dinner plates." Veteran scouter Bill Edwards is in his mid-80s and walks everywhere. Over the year he uses many of the local footpaths and is a keen observer of the countryside. Last winter he spotted active honeycombs hanging from the branches of a bush alongside a stream. He noticed, too, a yellow brain fungus, growing on oak, whose lobes and folds were so expanded that from a distance it looked like a daffodil. This time he'd been using the path that links two parts of the town, along the line of the old railway with housing estates at each end. It runs along the perimeter of a school and it was there on the margins of the woodland that he'd seen them.

Related: Country diary: Oxen Wood, Northamptonshire: A splash of real colour bursts out of an oak twig