On our weekend in Wytham Woods we and the students wrote a few words of poetry in response to finding and learning about fungi, and then standing still and looking closely as something in the woods for a few minutes. The woods were in full autumn colours, everything was wet, and there were amazing fungi everywhere. These are what the students wrote that day.

Battlefield

The flora’s fallen brethren

Consumed by the unseen scent

Ready to set the cycle again

Old and fallen trees, decaying in the woods

It was dying, but, it was helping new lives

To appear, small twenty mushrooms.

Nutty, wise

Lucky disguise.

Caring, strong

Daring song.

Three little mushrooms living off the dead,

With nowhere to grow but up ahead

Three little mushrooms living among the dead,

It’s a graveyard someone once said…

Branch like fungi, grey with a narrow roof surfacing gills

Existed in a colony exuding a nutty scent.

A broken tree trunk with red mushrooms growing out of it’s broken end.

“lying broken detached by my roots although unknown red raw roots are growing beneath me.”

Cream and brown splothches like bubbles rising skywards

Shortly to fall earthwards as the tree trunk dissolves

Fungi oasis in a birch stump. Thriving where the tree is no longer. Silent in the cracking, dripping, plinking, wish-ing soundscape.

Fungi littered around you

Green splattered around the bark

Roots buried deep

Unmoving.

In the greatest of winds

Only few branches remain.