A Fun Guide to Fungi

Gardening with the RHS

Royal Horticultural Society

Home & Garden, Leisure, Hobbies

4.4 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This Saturday – 7 October – is UK Fungus Day. And so for this week’s show, we’re exploring the fascinating faces of fungi. We’re taking a tour of the Fungus Garden at RHS Wisley, journeying back in time with biologist Merlin Sheldrake to investigate our historical uses of these organisms, chatting about 3 easy ways you can grow your own edible mushrooms, and finally, we’re returning to Wisley to get an update on the science team’s honey fungus research. The music you hear at the very beginning of the show was created by Cosmo Sheldrake. The sounds you hear -- apart from the accompanying piano -- are from recordings of oyster mushrooms devouring a copy of Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life. You can listen to the entire song here. Links: Saprotrophic fungi Mycorrhizal fungi Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures Rebel Gardening: A Beginner’s Handbook to Creating an Organic Urban Garden Honey Fungus: identifying mushrooms 10 fun facts about fungi

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get your tickets for the greatest show in Earth at an RHS garden near you.
0:05.1	Where nature puts on an unforgettable performance of colour and fragrance.
0:09.3	The scenery changes many times in one season and our finest trees will happily play the part of...
0:14.7	The best hiding place ever.
0:17.4	Booth!
0:18.2	Put your day out of dreams in the hands of the experts.
0:21.6	It's the greatest show in Earth.
0:23.6	At an RHS garden near you.
0:25.6	Book tickets online for discounts plus under fives go free and under 16 to five pounds.
0:30.6	I found that thinking about fungi and studying fungi makes the world look different.
0:36.6	Without them, a lot of plants and trees actually couldn't survive in the environments that we're planting them in.
0:43.3	They wouldn't be able to take up the nutrition that they actually require without the association of the fungi.
0:49.3	Fungi lived their lives enmeshed in their environment, unlike animals which find food and put it inside
0:55.5	their bodies to digest it, fungi put their bodies inside their food.
1:00.1	And it's an incredible feeling I assure you whenever you have your logs productive around your
1:06.4	garden and you can pick up your fresh mushrooms.
1:11.6	Like plants and animals, fungi make up a kingdom all of their own.
1:14.6	It's a mind-bendingly complex and fascinating world of mushrooms, moulds, mildews and mycelia,
1:20.6	and it's a kingdom that's all too often overlooked.
1:23.6	They're more similar to animals than plants and they grow in almost every
1:28.2	ecosystem, surviving in the most barren conditions such as on sand dunes or glaciers or even in
1:33.4	toxic wastelands. So of course, in our gardens are everywhere. It's just mind-blowing that
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