It’s winter and fungi are everywhere, all the parks and gardens are decorated with funky hybrids of Rhododendrons and Sea Cucumbers. So in line with what appears to be mushroom season, I thought I’d post some photos I took a while back of the closest thing to wildlife I could find without going anywhere near the wild…or life.
The other week I was watching a television show called ‘Big Ideas’ and the photographer Jason Edwards was talking about his career and the stories behind some of his photos. His job sounds unbelievable, he’s employed and commissioned by National Geographic to travel to remote and often volatile destinations to document various societal and environmental occurrences. Any photographer with his level of professional accomplishment obviously offers something special, not only does he provide a refreshingly honest insight into exceptional situations (see: little wombat bottom), but he is so sensitively engaged with every aspect of the photographic process and subject, and so passionate about what his photos represent.
He was really interesting, I think watching an enthusiastic intelligent person speak with modesty about what they excel at, especially one with compassion and who recognises their role in the broader picture, is one of the most resonant forms of inspiration. Basically, he has an absolute dream job.. well, almost… I might pass on the part where an Amazonian critter once forcibly inhabited his eye socket causing spontaneous blindness and a gelatinous eggy formation to come oozing out.. Considering I start crying when a small spider even enters a room I’m in, my response to that situation would most likely be somewhere between panic and attack…
Anyway, it was a beautiful day, I had a thousand other less interesting things I should have probably been doing, but my new SLR was looking a bit sad and unused because I’m struggling to master the controls (why are there so many buttons and dials and options and gahh!?!)
At the time these little guys were growing in my garden, although later in the week they were brutally murdered, (had we not exterminated them with the lawn mower they may well have taken over the entire house and possibly poisoned us in our sleep). So I thought, what better way to procrastinate university readings than to challenge myself to make the little creeps look pretty in photographs. Cameras provide a useful tool for capturing scenes or subjects in compositions our eyes cannot or do not formulate. You know, with the aperture and depth of field all that technical stuff… Plus, it’s almost guilt free procrastination when the alternative is just as nerdy, riiight? Seriously, who thinks - ‘Ooh I know what will be great fun, spending an hour lying in damp grass taking photos of freaky-weird fungus’… Apparently I do, and yep, I realise I should probably get a life, but I guess it’s sort of practise… Edwards spent hours in freezing cold water to get a shot of a sea lion growling or yawning or singing or something, during which the sea lion is apparently draping its enormous body over his legs. I need to endure discomfort if I am to take any interesting photographs of wild things…Ahh shit, who am i kidding? Sea lions are way more awesome than fungi.
Still, it’s all experience. And fungi can be dangerous too, you know! What struck me as most bizarre when I approached the mushroom patch to photograph them was that they had a real presence… No, I was not simultaneously eating them and therefore hallucinating, I’m serious.. their creepy fungi energy was real! I honestly felt as though I was trespassing on their neck of the woods, I could almost hear them muttering obscenities at me and my stupidly large lens. Plus they smelled funny, like…really funny. Okay, so maybe I’m being a tad sensitive, but I don’t have much experience with up-close fungal consideration (do you?), I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was disrupting the peace. More than any other plant in my garden, the mushroom patch constituted an eco-system in its entirety. There were big ones, small ones, different shaped ones, all hangin’ out around an old tree stump, extracting nutrients from its rotting roots whilst providing a safe-haven for spiders and insects and other garden-terrorists.
I didn’t trust those shifty shrooms, they were arrogant and pungent. But most unnerving of all was that they represented an ecosystem simultaneously dependent and independent of human activity. They sprung up out of nowhere, and assumed control of a large section of my garden, but at the same time, their continuation as a life form was in the hands of destructive neat-freak domesticated human-beings. And we chose to destroy them.
It’s funny how humans like to visit botanic gardens and green houses, to have the option of sitting in a park on the grass or under a tree, we buy flowers for our houses and nursery grown seedlings for our pots, but it all has to be on our terms because if the plants become even slightly disobedient (read: overgrown) we consider them threatening and proceed to maliciously discipline them with machine powered blades and super sharp shears. We’re a contradictory bunch, are we not? I post about my imaginary beef with the mushroom patch, and the whole of last week I spent walking in a rain forest taking photographs of ‘wild’ plants, (including fungi that looked almost, if not exactly the same as the stuff growing in my garden). So in memory of the shrooms that we later destroyed for no particular reason other than we didn’t plan their presence, here is my attempt at providing an aesthetically pleasing insight into the wonderful world of garden fun-gi.
click for more photos!
