Mushroom Diary: Autumn 2025 in Photos of Fungi

I’ve been reading a lot about fungal fiction and the fungal turn recently. It gets to a point where it’s weird to be inside reading about mushrooms when there are actual mushrooms outside. Accordingly, I’ve been fungi spotting whenever I’ve been out, and even going on mushroom walks specifically to look for them.

I started photographing the fungi I saw with the intention of going home and identifying them. After borrowing Roger Phillips’ Mushrooms from the library, I realised that was naive. There are thousands of mushrooms and many of them look very similar. You need to observe the smell and texture of mushrooms and even take a spore print to properly identify them. Still, I have ended up with a nice photographic mushroom diary.

Keeds Woods, Long Ashton

I headed out to the woods for a mushroom walk not knowing if I’d see any. I saw loads! Although I’m generally not going to be able to name them for you, sorry. Any help in the comments would be appreciated.

I know this one (I think…) King Alfred’s cakes. Although I usually see them horizontal on dead logs, not vertical.

Festival Way cycle path, Long Ashton

Inkcaps I think (reasonably confident on these).

Ashton Court, Bristol

Spotted these under a bush on the way to the library at UWE Bower Ashton.

My street, Long Ashton

Noticing something this small made me feel my mushroom-spotting skills are coming along.

Bedminster Cricket Club, Bristol

By the side of the cyclepath where it goes past the cricket club

In the countryside

My parents live in a rural village on the border of Gloucestershire and Warwickshire and I thought I would spot a fair few mushrooms when I visited. I joined my mum to walk the dog around the fields. The sloes were a blue haze in the hedgerows. Interspersed amongst them were bursts of red haws and the last of the purple elderberries (slightly shrivelled). The autumn leaves, some still on the branches and others lying leaf litter on the ground, completed the picture… almost. Where were the mushrooms?

I didn’t spot any mushrooms on the walk, despite checking tree stumps and in the fallen leaves. I could only speculate that the adjacent arable fields had been treated with fungicide. My mushroom diary from the countryside is all from gardens and other cultivated places.