Author: margaret21

I'm retired and live in North Yorkshire, where I walk , write, volunteer and travel as often as I can.

Fascinating Fungi

It’s not really the time of year for fungi here in Europe, but we’ve just come back from Spain, and more importantly France, where at the right time of year, fungus-foraging is by way of being a national obsession. Find a secret cache in the woodlands, and no right thinking Frenchman will share its location with anyone: not brother, cousin, or best friend. An elderly man who lived up the road from us, back when we lived in the Ariège, took the knowledge of where his secret foraging-place was to his grave.

I too forage, as I was brought up doing. One of my earliest memories is of being got up by my mother at perhaps 5’clock to go to the local American airfield, disused since the war, to harvest field mushrooms and puffballs. I still forage – but very carefully. I’m sure only of field mushrooms and the unmistakeable puffball, as well as shaggy inkcaps and chanterelles.

Today though, for Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #8: Fascinating Fungi, I’m sharing pictures of the definitely inedible. Here are bracket fungi, and others that thrive on tree trunks and fallen timbers. I’m ashamed to say I don’t know the names of a single one: can anyone help? But there are no mushrooms-on-toast opportunities here!

A Very Good Friday in Canet de Mar

A public holiday. Where to go, when everyone everywhere is looking for an outing? Emily and Miquel chose Canet de Mar, a few miles up the coast. A characterful little town that was the home of Lluís Domènech i Montaner, a Modernist architect whom I hugely admire, and who deserves a post later. A museum visit (the featured photo), a long lazy meal, moments on the beach playing with Anaïs. I call that the perfect day.

Sharp

Here we are in Spain. Between travel fatigue and the fun of a family wedding – all in Catalan – getting an album of Sharp Shots for Denzil’s photo challenge this week has been an unusual one. https://denzilnature.com/2023/03/29/nature-photo-challenge-6-sharp/

But here are a few shots of prickly plants from nearby gardens.

Click on the images to view them full size.

And here’s another sort of sharp.

Four Postcards: Three Designed to Inspire Awe.

From the wonders of nine hundred year old man-made cathedrals…

Reims Cathedral, built between 1211 and 1345

… to the perhaps two hundred and fifty million year old natural wonder which is the Gorges du Tarn (better photos later, I hope. My phone-camera was over-awed) …

The Gorges du Tarn, several million years in the making.

… to the twenty year old wonder which is the Millau Viaduct.

Millau Viaduct, the tallest bridge in the world, with a structural height of 336.4 metres.

The featured photo shows a spot of shock and awe from a weathered statue stacked outside Reims Cathedral and awaiting restoration.

A postcard from Troyes: a Half-timbered City

We’re on our way to Spain to see daughter and family, trundling down through eastern France. Now we’re in the Aube, in Troyes. It’s been a successful city since Roman times, but what you see now is a place that still has hundreds of half-timbered houses. Still lived in, still used as shops and business-places. A few are in bad nick. Some are being renovated. Some lean at impossibly drunken angles. Most are well cared for and entirely habitable, just getting on with life, as they have been for centuries. And a few of them provide a convenient surface for discreet pieces of street art.