The Visitors

8 February 2025

Heavy rains have brought a bunch of grapes lying in the mud. Bulbous and black, at first glance they could be the spoils from a rat raid on the compost heap. Looking closer, there is something odd about their shape, their sheen, their dense compaction. Lifting one end with a trowel I see stems and gills – they are the fruiting bodies of fungi.

They are growing in a pit we dug around the old Wild Cherry. The stump is drilled with holes. The exposed roots are now so dark, it is hard to distinguish them from the soil. The trunk is coated with an algal bloom, it is topped with moss and a Vinca resides in the cavity. I am hoping some beetles will move in.

It takes seven years to kill a tree.

This black fungus is not photogenic. It resists every angle and the images are bleak. iNaturalist does its best but offers Twiglets (unlikely). Google comes up with Amethyst Deceiver (it is not violet). An old book, published years before I was born, raises the possibility of Blue Caps (as if). A more recent publication has no sensible suggestions at all, so I ask around. No one knows. It remains nameless.

I consider the significance of its location. It is a metre from the tree stump and unsettling how very similar the fruits are to cherries. Not the hard black cherries Prunus avium produces, gobbled up by birds before anyone else gets a look in, but supermarket cherries - huge purple cherries the children ate from punnets as they sat under the tree on bright summer afternoons. In those days, the tree held a rope ladder and a swing. Its vast canopy was filled with white blossom every spring. Its gnarled trunk was rippled and fissured, reminiscent of elephant hide, like one large foot planted in the children’s playscape.

Close up, there are fine lines on the caps of the fungi - like the stripes on a mushroom a child draws. The gills are burgundy-red. The stem is pinkish-white. Each fruiting body is 2.5 – 3cm tall and no more than 1.5 cm wide. The bell-shaped caps look bitter and greasy; someone has taken a nibble but not returned for more. There is something so repellent about their dull glaze that I do not want to touch them. Reluctant even to sniff them, I lean down into the mud but there is no scent.

Seven years ago, the branch that held the swing ripped, letting in disease. Seven years earlier, these false fruits could have found their way onto picnic plates to feed the dolls. Seven years before that, I planted the Wild Cherry. I clean my trowel and put it away in the playhouse. This too is rotting. With a broken wall and a hole in the floor it is ending its life as a potting shed.

A week later, another photo brings different results: Maroon Brittlestem. Some Brittlestems are saphrobic, feeding on rotting roots and stumps. Some Brittlestems are hygrophanous, changing colour when wet. All Brittlestems, it seems, like to cluster. Mycelium mystery solved.

Every few days, more appear. Crowding together in a death-bed vigil for this once-majestic tree, they swell as it shrinks into the earth. What use have you for sun, they say – come with us into the underworld. You will be welcome … there are grapes and cherries for tea.