Heroes Not Zombies

Yesterday I shared a photo of a lichen covered rock sitting amongst moss. All the elements of that photo were beautiful and provoked a sense of wonder and a feeling of awe.

This photo does the same. It’s a fungus growing on a tree and it’s colours make it look for all the world like a gorgeous piece of agate.

I remember times as a child, on family walks in Scotland, we’d look for pieces of agate. Finding them was like finding treasure. You could tumble them in a motor driven cylinder to polish them up but I thought the best ones were often those already polished by the sea and the millions of other pebbles they’d rattled over.

Fungus are astonishing life forms that are mostly hidden from our view. The parts popping up on the surfaces of trees or through the grass are just a tiny portion of their existence. They form the most incredibly large networks of fibres under the ground creating interconnectons and relationships between trees and other plants.

These networks have only recently been shown to function as carriers of both information and materials and are the core of what people call “the wood wide web”.

It’s amazing how little we actually understand about reality!