Friday 30 November 2012

White Coral

Ramariopsis kunzei
Wouldn't it be odd to stumble upon a glistening white coral as you wander through the woods? As if, just before you got there, the whole forest was a tropical reef and you discovered one of the stragglers left behind by the change.

Image: Petroglyph via Flickr
They're actually mushrooms of course, lovely, elegant mushrooms.

Image: Eric Smith
They reach about 5 cm (2 in) tall and the same across and can be found all over the place, in various parts of North America, Europe, Asia and Australia

Image: Biopix: JC Schou
To me they look like mythical palaces. Like the poor pixies live in toadstools while the rich ones live in these heavenly edifices of wonder and delight. That's the reality of pixie society, I'm afraid.

Image: Biopix: JC Schou
The ivory towers of pixie nobility, yesterday.

5 comments:

Joseph JG said...

For sure!

Anonymous said...

I swore they were coral the before I read the post! They remind me of plants I used to find deep in the forest in NYS called Indian Pipes. I wonder if they are the same family. "pipes" look more ramshackle though, so perhaps they are homes of nobility that are out of favor.

Crunchy said...

I think I found some of these guys in my fridge the other day. Do they like meatballs?

Joseph JG said...

@stregajewellry: Indian Pipes? Not the Ghost Plants from last Halloween?:

http://www.realmonstrosities.com/2011/10/natural-born-halloween-horrors.html

I pretty much want to make a whole mushroom city now!

@Crunchy: Meatballs, hmmm... Difficult to say. Obviously sausages are usually of such low quality that only the lowliest of mushrooms would recognise it as food, but it may be a different story for meatballs.

Local Ork said...

I saw those few years ago in Poland, except they were bright orange.