Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 74
A Nature Book Reader
NINA LYON
Nina Lyon is the author of ‘Mushroom Season’ and ‘Uprooted: On the Trail
of the Green Man’, and is interested in mythology, overgrown places and the
oddities of the mind.
The Hamlyn Book of
Mushrooms and Fungi By Mirko Svrcek
I came across the Mushroom
Book, as it is known in our
family, in more nefarious
times. It had been acquired by
my then partner in a secondhand bookshop in Hay
with the primary intention
of preventing any mishap
when collecting psilocybin
mushrooms in the days,
around a decade ago, that
they were still legal.
November afternoons
would consist of a very late
breakfast followed by a trip
to the mountain in the dying
light, carrier bags in pockets,
the car parked just out of sight
of the road. The best bit of
them was coming home to
tea and toast and poring over
the book in the warm kitchen
where, we fancied, some
sort of transdermal activity
brought its illustrations to life.
We got sucked in. We
74
would slowly enunciate
words like “globose” and
“adnate”, delighting in
their sound. We could quite
easily spend two or three
hours refilling the teapot and
flipping from page to page in
search of obtuse mycological
terminology or the exact
mechanism of muscarine
poisoning. We also got lost
in the pictures, which are
photographically accurate
watercolour illustrations. We
could almost smell the fungal
damp.
Some years later our
children developed a love
for the Mushroom Book
characterised by similar sorts
of behaviour. They would
pore over the pictures and
look for the pages with the
most skull-and-crossbone
motifs. The book’s size and
weight makes it impossible
