Golf
When Steve Oultram, Course Manager at The Wilmslow Golf Club in Cheshire, met a member who confessed to being fanatical about
mushrooms, he had an idea.
Steve, winner of the North of England Golf Environment Award for 2011, had often wondered how many different species of fungi could be found on the course.
Would the member be willing to add to Steve’s growing volume of ecological data on the course, by conducting a survey of the fungi that he and his team observe every autumn under Wilmslow’s magnificent oak, beech and birch trees, and alongside its 400-year-old hedgerows?
Retired journalist, Roger Langley, was happy to oblige. He had been
collecting and eating the best of the edible species found on the course for nearly thirty years, but had never been asked to conduct a formal survey. He told Steve he
expected to find around forty to fifty different species on the 6635-yard par 72 course. Imagine his surprise when he found over eighty.
The varieties found turned out to be ...
The GOOD, the BAD and the DEADLY! T
he magnificent beech and oak trees that adorn the Wilmslow golf course, together with its ancient hedgerows and hundreds of silver birch, provide an ideal habitat for many species of British fungi. Enhance that habitat with our wettest and mildest autumn for more than thirty years, and you have all the makings of a bumper season for mushrooms, toadstools, puff balls and brackets. I have collected, studied and eaten
Wilmslow’s fungi since I joined the club in the eighties and the ‘harvest’ of 2011 was, comfortably, the biggest and best I can remember.
Between the end of April and the first week of December, I recorded more than eighty different species, which is roughly a fifth of the number of fungi illustrated and described in popular mushroom guides and handbooks.
Steve Oultram, Course Manager, The Wilmslow Golf Club
Ideal conditions in late summer and autumn were prolonged by an exceptionally mild start to the winter, with most areas of the country escaping
ingredient in the steak and mushroom pies that can often be found on the winter menus of village pubs in the Midlands. My own little harvest earlier this month made a very tasty
the severe frosts that bring an abrupt end to the fungi season. Species like the poisonous Fly Agaric, the distinctive red-and-white capped mushroom always associated with silver birch, were still going strong two weeks before Christmas. Traditionally, they disappear from our course by the end of October or early November. Just about the last edible mushroom of the fungi season is the delicious Wood Blewit, which stubbornly resists severe frosts and can still be found under a protective carpet of leaf litter in late November and early December. To my amazement, as recently as 12th January I found an undamaged cluster of this lovely mushroom, whose underside colours are blue-to-lilac and later brown, just over the bridge on the seventeenth. The Wood Blewit is a popular
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