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Tag Archives: fungi

RegularRandom: 5 minutes with fungus

09 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in challenges, photos

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

fungi, Mystery Bay, RegularRandom

I return to the Mystery Bay kink zone, this time with my co-neophyte-geologist, who is much better at it than me, although his understanding is also in its infancy. We prowl amongst the rocks, gingerly, because his adductor muscle still hasn’t healed itself, doing more speculating than knowing.  

After a picnic just like the ones we used to share pre-Warsaw, we explore the car parks of Mystery Bay, looking for an elusive boat ramp. We don’t find it, but we do come across new picnic grounds: gazebo with tables, gas barbecues, mowed lawn, a loo of course (worth commenting on after the dearth in Warsaw), and an irresistible invitation to spend five minutes with an elegant fungus that has attached itself to a tree root. It is fresh and large, gills white, top a rich array of velvety browns. The grass is dry and soft so it’s easy to lie flat on my face and poke the lens up into the gills, wishing yet again I’d brought my old camera with its superior close-up capacity. Note to self: Put the bloody thing in the car!




This is my attempt to meet DesleyJane’s irresistible RegularRandom challenge. This week she sets the standard with 5 Minutes with pens.

Every twenty steps: a celebration of the earth

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

bark, bush track, fungi, grass, leaves, spotted gums, wattle

I want to be in the bush, I don’t want to drive far, I’m fearful that closeby familiar bush won’t offer me anything. I’ve had that fear before, and it’s never justified. I decide to stop every twenty steps and photograph whatever offers itself. I’m astonished at the results. OK! So I don’t obey my own rules absolutely: sometimes I go a few paces back or forwards. Sometimes I’m forced to stop before the regulation 20 by something irresistible. Whenever I look around and think “Rats: just more dead leaves”, I find a couple of small hakeas, a mushroom shoving up the dead leaves, black resin which looks like a skeleton, a curl of bark around a stick. Always something. Old acquaintances: bark, flowers, fungi, desiccated leaves, traces, tracks, spotted gums. And new subjects: bush layers; landscape seen through a veil of foliage; grasses and fern. I even manage to catch birds at play in a string of mud pools.

Here’s the haul from my first “every 20 steps” photo shoot. And no. It is NOT the beginning of a series! Maybe the beginning of a habit, but not a series. Definitely not a series.












Wordless walks: Jemisons Beach and headland

15 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

fungi, Jemisons Beach, Jemisons Headland, macropods, rocks, sand





A walk without purpose

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in beach walk, photos

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

fungi, Jemisons Beach, sand cliffs, seaweed

My stamina for focused reading has dropped right off, although I can devour a lightweight detective story in three gulps. So I discipline myself to sit for a solid hour with notebook, pen and Kindle, as I read “The years of extermination: Nazi German and the Jews 1939-1945” by Saul Friedländer. I recharge the iPad in another room so I can’t flick it on to check this and that. By the time I’ve finished, I’ve learnt more than my heart wants to know.

After lunch walk struggles with doze. Walk wins. Along my street past a cluster of mushrooms, the big-as-a-dinner-plate ones, pushing through the loose soil on the verge, some smaller and creamy-brown, one with a peeling browned-meringue top. Up the board stairs, watching my footing carefully, and down on to Jemisons Beach, high sandcliffs a legacy of heavy seas. 



I find a sand-shelf just the right height for sitting and let the sun, the breeze, and the sound of the sea relax me. My companions are a swathe of sea-weed and a white crab claw. I watch the waves crashing on the rocks, counting to seven as I wait for the next big one. 

When I’m sufficiently soothed I head towards the track behind the dunes and discover freshgoldenred seaweed, traces of the ocean far beyond what I thought was its reach. Along the track, more fungi: beige spots and stripes, rich velvety brown, orange, and brilliant red. 


There are tiny flowers, even wattle with its fist-buds, and in my front yard minute red mushrooms lurking under the creeping foliage of scurvy weed.

Oh and near home, traces of the hobbit among the casuarinas.

Reclaiming the headland

19 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in family, Jemisons Headland, photos

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

casuarina, fungi, ocean, spotted gum, tracks

Gradually I’m re-establishing myself at the Point. My second walk is out onto the headland, on a misty morning when Mother Gulaga is completely buried under cloud. I need to watch my footing: Warsaw cobblestones are replaced by banksia roots; dog shit by kangaroo poo; ice and snow by squelchy mud.  

Beautifully constructed ant-nests, like the work of a master potter, emerge from the sandy track. I am startled when I reach the beach: the creek has retreated from the sea, cut off by a high sandbar, and I can cross the sand directly without having to angle my way along a crumbly sand-cliff edge. When I left a year ago this was not so: the creek intermittently emptied straight into the ocean. I miss the actual presence of kangaroos: I don’t see one where in the past this early in the morning I might see up to 40. My son reckons they’re all grazing on lawns in the village.


I walk up the wooden stairs and along the track heading south. I stand on the headland and watch the sea rolling in, sending up eruptions of splash and waterfalling back down over the rocks. Here at the place where I lay watching eagles swirl just overhead with my niece; contemplated life on the first day of retirement; sat reading and whalewatching in beautiful solitude; photographed friends in a studio without equal; and fended off the man in brown shoes.

I’m glad to renew my acquaintance with old familiars, casuarinas with their lichen trunks and spotted gums with their hallmark splotches.

There’s a fanfare of fungus: everywhere the white tops and frilliness of mushrooms, some as big as a good-sized saucer with a stippled cap;  some delicate, not much more than skeletal; some standing proudly on a tall stem; some brown and white; some russet as they emerge from casuarina needles; and one a rich crimson with a minute pool in its cap.






Soon I’ll be a re-natived Potato Pointian!

Reclaiming the beach

19 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in Eurobodalla beaches, photos

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

fungi, home roads, Potato Point beach, seaweed

I’ve been home from a year in Warsaw for a week and all I’ve done is sleep peculiar hours and feel displaced. It has taken me all that time to drive my unwilling feet down to the beach, despite all the envy I expressed of other people’s beaches. Why? I want stimulation and I tell myself, as I have many times before, that I’ve seen all there is to see. I finally drag myself out early on a drizzly day, sky vanished in grey sea mist. I ramble around the village, walking up my street, stopping at the viewing seat above Jemison’s Beach and passing judgement on the wooden stairs completed while I was away; walking up the hill to the trig past grazing wallabies and a raindrop-speckled yucca; and then down to the seaweed strewn sand of Potato Point beach. 

The tide is low and the colour leached. I see the world through rain-specked glasses, and feel the beach working a bit of preliminary magic. The light is perfect for photography, and clumps of seaweed lie on the sand arranged like artworks on a gallery wall, not so many that it’s overwhelming.

I leave the beach to walk back along the puddly road and encounter the precursors to a festival of fungi.

I  amble across Troll Bridge and the grassy kangaroo-lolling patch. One old fellow missing an ear looks up at me from the swamp. I’ve begun to reclaim my southern hemisphere home.

Midsummer gallimaufry

24 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by morselsandscraps in flora, photos

≈ 38 Comments

Tags

banksia, bunya bunya pine, chicory, fungi, leaves, thistles, tristaniopsis, wattle

It was a while since I'd been out and about, camera slung around my neck. The flood drew me to roadside plants, and at last I've begun walking again in the bush, on the headland and through farmland, after nearly a month of slug behaviour, incarcerated indoors by catering and computer addiction and for at least part of that time by a recalcitrant knee (if I don't walk, I won't find out how bad it is).

Roadside during the flood gave me whiteness: bursaria, ti trees, and what charms my camera most: that flat flowering, pink, white and green, that curls up into a ball as it dies and lightens the landscape with its delicacy. It doesn't matter that it's a feral.

 

 

I've finally entered J's vegetable dome on a picking expedition and was enchanted by my old friend, the zucchini plant. Many years ago in my incarnation as labourer in our market garden I harvested zucchini. I can still feel the abrasion on my tender damp unaccustomed academic arms as I parted zucchini leaves to seek out the gleaming shapely tubes, rounded at the end and sometimes with the showy yellow flower still attached. At market I arrayed them on an old door with all our other produce, and the people of Moruya asked “What's THAT?” This was in the 1980s. Now they take kale and quinoa in their stride.

 

 

On the headland is a grand old banksia. The flowers are over 20cm tall, with a diameter of around 12 cm, and some still stand erect and pale yellow, amongst the big bad banksia men cones. Once the tree was unreachable unless you wanted to brave snakes in long marshy grass, but since the fire brigade engaged in a protective burn I can walk confidently over short grass to admire its grandeur.

 

 

Also on the headland, an unexpected wattle with balls of pale yellow flower, little fists of buds and long lanceolate leaves curving around clusters of blossom.

 

 

Walking through farmland I came across another majestic tree, a little bit out of zone: the bunya bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii). It's a relative of the monkey puzzle tree from Chile, an ancient tree from Gondwana and the age of conifers, a survivor from the time before the arrival of true flowering plants. The female cones contain edible nuts and Bunya Mountains in Queensland were the site for Aboriginal gatherings and feasting: unusually for Aboriginal people some trees seem to have been owned by specific families. My bush tucker book has three recipes using bunya nuts: toffee nuts in rum, chocolate roughs with bunya nut pieces, and witjuti (witchetty) grub and bunya bunya soup

 

 

In the reserve by the river is another treasure: Tristaniopsis laurena, the water gum or Kanuka box, used for coach and boat-building, cabinet work, tool handles and golf club heads. This information comes from a book that is also a treasure: the bible of local rainforests, Floyd's Rainforest trees of south-eastern Australia. J bought me my own copy recently, $5 from the Salvation Army op shop. Floyd reveals the poetry of bark in his meticulously factual description:

Outer bark: Light grey, shedding in thin papery flakes or strips. Underbark cream with plum patches, then brown and cream in alternate layers, very thin. Outer surface of live bark with cream-brown and light green blotches.

The flowers are hard to capture: two cameras and two visits still didn't quite nail it.

 

 

There is an escalation of thistles, all very well as decoration on a Scotsman's sporran, but a real pest here, especially since the ground is already deep in thistledown: too late to stop them proliferating this season.

 

 

Australia doesn't have the autumn falling, but leaves do part company with their tree and they are one of my favourite photographic subjects. A gravel road or grass make a good background to showcase their diversity.

 

 

And then of course a miscellany within a gallimaufry: chicory flowers, lomandra fruits, a delicate fungus (awful name for something so beautiful), spiky grass and a tree fern against the sky.

 

 

My preference, I thought, was for flowers in the wild, but my daughter-in-law filled the house with domesticated flowers and I was entirely charmed. The zinnias came from J's dome (it was a bouquet of zinnias he brought me when our first child was born): the three lavish vases of roses, jasmine, and gardenias from the garden of her friend. I admired the background ferns, and discovered that they came from my own garden.

 

 

 

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

Late spring in the bush

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in Eurobodalla bush, photos

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

flowers, fungi, seed pods

 

 

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

Heading north

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in Mossman Gorge, photos

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

fungi, Pamela Salt, rainforest

It's time to leave my cabin and collect a new home. This time it's a campervan, and the thought of it daunts me. After all, my normal vehicle is a Yaris. Our first moments alone together aren't auspicious: I can't seem to engage first gear, which is a disadvantage in a city of traffic lights and roundabouts.

However, our relationship improves, and I head north to Mossman in the forests of the Daintree, a world heritage area. The road is windy, but there's not much traffic, and the speed limit hovers between 60 and 80. The road is beautiful: put my hand out the window one way and I touch deeply forested hills: put it out the other and it dangles in the Coral Sea. I have to recalibrate my thinking about distance here. Sixty kilometres takes a couple of hours, and that's not only because I dawdle and sightsee. My campsite is by the Mossman River. I manage to reverse and plug into electricity, but I don't manage to realise that the campervan table does double duty as bed base and for two nights I huddle on a very narrow mattress.

I'm off early the next morning to shop for supplies: I love being able to put them straight in the refrigerator. And then to the real business of this journey north. I make my way to Mossman Gorge, and set off on the path less travelled, away from the rest of the shuttle bus passengers. I can hear a river roaring and soon I'm beside it, looking down at boulders and rushing water through the trunks of trees. The boardwalk is actually made from recycled plastic, which provides a non-slip surface, requires less maintenance and doesn't rot.

The track, dirt now, soon moves to the rainforest, and rain falls in sheets. People pass wearing towels and raincoats, or more suitably clad merely in rain. I have an umbrella, but it's not much use. I love the rain. It draws unexpectedly rich colour from bark and fungi. When it stops, drops still fall, moving leaves and making me suspect the presence of scurrying animals, never quite seen. This rainforest is bigger in every way than the patches I'm used to on the south coast. The buttresses are immense and elegantly curved, collecting moss and leaves and ferns in their swirls.

Back at the information centre, I prowl around the shop looking for a gift for my daughter's Polish mother-in-law. I'm drawn to wallet with a design of a dilly bag, white threads on green, and as I'm buying it I meet the artist, Pamela Salt. She was named after her great grandmother, Wawu Jirray, which means spirit-plenty, good-hearted, a lot to give. Kuku Yulanji women have woven dilly bags from the black palm for thousands of years. She lets me take her photo, in front of the painting, and in front of the palm that provides the fibre for the weaving the painting represents. The fibre comes from the trunk, between the top ring and the black. This is a gift that fits: Ola is spirit plenty, good hearted and has a lot to give, and when she visited Australia palms were the thing that most caught her attention – palms at the airport and then burrawangs at Potato Point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

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