These mushrooms are brittle and prefer to grow on dead wood

Most mushrooms look beautiful. In primary school, the teacher had us collect ingredients for an autumn table. We went into the forest with the class an hour before. We came back with autumn leaves, acorns and pine cones, but mainly mushrooms.

It was enough to turn all the school desks into autumn tables. We received the message to leave mushrooms for the time being. I'm afraid we had completely stripped the bush where we were looking. I already thought it was a shame at the time: wouldn't it be better to leave something beautiful? However, many fungi are so small or camouflaged that we must have overlooked them. I think the helmet mycenas (photo) escaped the collecting frenzy.

Nowadays, forests are also stripped of mushrooms. Regardless of culinary and commercial greed, mushroom connoisseurs often pick their beloved objects. They are easier to identify in the hand and there is no harm, because the visible mushroom - cap on stem - is just the fruit and you can pick it just like an apple. Anyone who cares about mushrooms should ensure that nitrogen deposition stops.

Although the removal of such a gem still fills me with regret. Now I often walk the dog, which has a rather inquisitive nature. When I picked a blackberry (I don't have a problem with that, no matter how inconsistent), the dog also bit into a blackberry. When I photograph mushrooms, she runs over to sniff them. So far she has never taken a bite, but with her belt she sometimes knocks down several at a time. I then put them upright again, so that they can at least drop their tracks.

The helmet mycenas in the photo have also been extensively sniffed. Fortunately, those beautiful broken bones were not knocked over. Helmeted mycenas grow on dead wood. Sometimes they are also in the grass, but then there is dead wood hidden underneath.

Four times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries .