Shrooms and plumes

Last Friday was one of those rare November days where the wind drops, the sun shines and although the temperature isn't hot, it isn't cold either. As regular readers will know, I have a very narrow optimal window for survival! It was so lovely that we abandoned our plans for the day and simply gardened, planting some shrubs along the wall at the front of the garden: cotoneasters, rambling roses and flowering currants. Then we wandered around to the back garden and had a further attempt at working out where and how we wanted trees planting around the perimeter of the wildflower meadow. We settled on repeated groups of three of Rowan, Willow and Downy Birch.

Whilst playing this game of musical trees, we found a small mushroom in the sward. It was quite easy to photograph it from above, but I struggled with a photograph from below as I tried to capture the structure of the gills (this feature often being useful for ID purposes).

Meantime, ObsIdentify reckoned that it was Stropharia semiglobata, Dung Roundhead, so I sent the photos to a local expert AG who cautioned "Maybe" and "The Genus has been changed to Protostropharia." Further advice from AG was to make a spore print, as spore colour can help with identification, because there is a confusion species for Dung Roundhead, which is Panaeolus semiovatus, Egghead Mottlegill (which does rather sound like a character from a high fantasy novel).

Removing the stem, I placed the head of the mushroom on a piece of white paper, covered it with an upturned mug and left it in the spare room for the night. The following morning we did indeed have a spore print and now I needed to decide whether the spores were brown-black or purple black. To my eye, they were just black, so I don't think we're any further forward. However, I had never attempted a spore print before, so was chuffed that it worked.

Yesterday, I noticed a small moth on the exterior frame of the bathroom window. When I say small, it was maybe 10mm from tip to tail, which in my book makes it a micro-moth as opposed to a macro-moth. Confession time, all my moth ID books are actually for macro-moths, so I didn't have a hope of working out what it was. However, ObsIdentify was 100% certain it was a Twenty-plume moth.

On the local moth-ers page on Facebook, there are often photos of Twenty-plume moths, but they all have their wings outspread like they're the Angel of the North. In fact, even in the Moth section of the Butterfly Conservation webpage, the Twenty-plumes are all jazz hands, not demure and introvert like this moth. Fortunately, a kind soul came to my rescue on Fb and assured me that, yes, it was a Twenty-plume moth.

Excitedly, I messaged Megan at work to share the joy of my find. When she came home though, she seemed a little disappointed, until I realised that she had read my "Twenty plume moth" as meaning a flock of 20 Plume Moths rather than one little micro. Still, it was a new addition to the garden list.

Also yesterday, it was my turn to cook the evening meal. There were some leeks and mushrooms which needed using up, so I made a pasta sauce (genius ingredient: a tin of chicken and mushroom soup), and in the process I finished off a jar of dried thyme. Subsequently, Megan washed the jar and set it aside to dry, meaning that this morning I wasn't sure whether to recycle it or put it to one side pending a refill. At lunchtime, I remembered to have the discussion, but as the words came out, "Let's use the thyme jar again", I sang it as though from the Rocky Horror Show.

Strangely, Megan failed to see the beauty of this pun!