Mushrooms and magic , fungi and fairies

Posted on 03/05/2025 by The Garden History Blog

Do you believe in fairies and magic? I’d guess that living in the 21st century the answer probably not. However, as I’m sure you realise,  there is a long history in virtually every culture of supernatural creatures and powers of all kinds and belief in them was almost universal.

This post isn’t going to try and convince you to change your mind but instead  follow up on last week’ post and look at the apparent  link between magic and mushrooms and fairies and fungi.

As many of you will know I’ve lectured widely in the history of garden gnomes and one of the things that struck when i was researching for that was how many mushrooms and toadstools appeared in images of them and other  “little folk”, whether in fairy stories or paintings. But why?

I wonder if it’s anything to do with the properties of certain mushrooms? So off we go down another research rabbit-hole. Continue reading →

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Mushrooms

Posted on 26/04/2025 by The Garden History Blog

I made dinner for a friend the other day, pasta with a nice mushroom sauce,  but was a bit puzzled when he looked and said “I don’t really like mushrooms. There’s just something about them that freaks me out. I mean how do you know they’re safe to eat?”  He’s definitely a mycetophobe!

It led me to wonder where this uncertainty came from. Was that  because of an irrational but inbuilt fear rooted in traditional stories about the dangers of eating fungi. Certainly , like most people, I’ve always been wary of picking  them when I find them in my own garden because although most fruiting fungi are actually safe to eat, we all know that eating one of the few wrong kinds can cause hallucinations, illness or even death.

It then made me ponder about  when we started cultivating mushrooms in the garden, and perhaps even more basically when  did we start eating them and becoming mycetophiles?

Continue reading →

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An Easter Parade… of Roses in the Pub

Posted on 19/04/2025 by The Garden History Blog

Easter is always a difficult time for garden-related bloggers – there’s only a limited and rather obvious range  of possibilities – bunnies, chocolate, easter lilies, ,passion flowers, chickens and eggs  and over the last 12 years I’ve done most of them.  Then I remembered a lovely story in a lecture I give about one of the nicest people in garden history  that took place one Easter.

We know gardening appeals to a very wide range of people but is it a classless pursuit?  Is there any real connection between the wealthy and their ability to garden on a grand scale:  think paid staff, stately homes, Gardens Illustrated and Chelsea…and the rest of us, constrained for space, time and money: think suburban back gardens, Gardener’s World and the local garden centre?

Perhaps not as much as we might  like and one person who definitely thought there ought to be more, was the Rev. Samuel Reynolds Hole,  Canon of Lincoln, later Dean of Rochester and a great rose enthusiast.  His sympathies are clear: “Not a soupçon of sympathy can I ever feel for the discomfiture of those Rose-growers who trust in riches .”

Read on to find out why….and to hear about the surprising people  he thought were the real gardeners.

Continue reading →

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Hunting for Rhododendrons in the Himalayas

Posted on 12/04/2025 by The Garden History Blog

As we saw last week Joseph Hooker was enamoured from an  early  age by botany, and having returned from  the Erebus expedition to the Antarctic he looked for  new plant hunting opportunities.

His friend Dr. Hugh Falconer, the future Director of the botanic gardens in Calcutta and later Edinburgh, recommended Sikkim as “being ground unseen by traveller or naturalist” which  offered the opportunity to investigate three distinct climatic zones from tropical in the valleys, through temperate forests , to alpine and montane. The idea obviously appealed.

Afyr a lot of string-pulling the Royal Navy  gave Joseph free passage on the ship taking Lord Dalhousie, the newly appointed Governor-General, to India in November 1847.  It came with a grant  of £400 per annum and  Joseph’s task was to head to the Himalayas and go plant hunting for Kew where, of course, his father Sir William Hooker, was the director.

Little did he know he’d be locked up and need a bit of gun-boat diplomacy to return home…or that he’d start a new plant craze in British gardens

Continue reading →

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Joseph Explores Antarctica

Posted on 05/04/2025 by The Garden History Blog

I was at Kew last week amongst hordes of people admiring the displays of cherries, magnolias and spring bulbs amongst other things. I wondered as I wandered, especially in the more popular areas around the main Victoria Gate entrance what Joseph Hooker, Kew’s  Director from 1865-1885, would have made of it.

One of the great characters in botanic history Hooker was famously adamant that  Kew was purely for science and not “mere pleasure or recreation seekers … whose motives are rude romping and games”.

I wondered why on earth he would think like that, so I started reading more about him, and as usual the more I read the interested I became. While I knew that he’d been plant hunting in the Himalayas  [more on that in another post soon] what I didn’t realise was that he made his reputation in somewhere completely different: plant hunting in Antarctica.

Continue reading →

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