Lucy Jones

Look at the underside of a log, and you’ll find my new obsession

A few years ago, I started looking at the underside of logs and it changed my life. I found a secret carnival of the most bodacious and interesting organisms I had ever seen. Bubbles of candy-pink gloss on stilts (Comatricha nigra), bunches of rainbow iridescence on toffee strings (Badhamia utricularis), bouffants of raspberry parfait (Arcyria denudata) – and those are just a few that have appeared on bits of wood in our urban garden. Slime moulds, or myxomycetes, spend part of their life cycle as what are known as fruiting bodies – once classified as fungi, they’re actually in the kingdom Protista. Often you will find them, at this stage, in a colony – or, well, I’d suggest galaxy, sweetshop or funfair would be more accurate for a collective noun.…

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Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 17 January 2025

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