Mushroom & Co

We’re most familiar with their often enchanting visible sides: beautiful fungi with marvellous names such as the turkey tail, the velvet foot, the devil’s bolete and the dead man’s hand. There are some that glow in the dark (the jacko’-lantern mushroom) and hugely expensive ones (white truffles), and they often come in the most amazing shapes, like the fluted bird’s nest, which resembles ‘a teeny-tiny cupcake case with a bear’s fur on the outside’.

But in fact, as Roebers points out in another evocative image, all these mushrooms and toadstools are merely the fingertips of an enormous underground fungus giant. He zooms in to focus on fungal threads beneath the soil’s surface. The book has an in-depth approach. We learn all about cells, yeasts, spores, the many different sexes of fungi and their history, which goes back millions of years. Amusingly, the timeline ends with the first edition of this book.

Roebers understands the art of explaining things in a funny and very accessible way that kindles the enthusiasm and provides plenty of facts to impress your friends. Did you know, for example, that the moisture that sometimes lingers on fungi isn’t dew, but ‘mould sweat’ and ‘mushroom pee’? Or that there are predatory fungi that set traps to catch worms? Or that penicillin is derived from fungi?

Wendy Panders’s illustrations make this book a vibrant whole: her pictures are clear, but also light and humorous. Next to the explanation of how fungi digest wood to make a nutritious soup, she draws a disappointed fungus wearing a bib and thinking to itself, ‘Wood soup? Again?’ And a large toad looks very puzzled by the tiny stool that he’s expected to perch on. This is a book that’s full of fungal fun!

Age: 10+