The Garden History Blog

Edible mushrooms from Revue d’horticulture belge 1913.

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?

19 species of Edible fungi: Coloured lithograph by A. Cornillon, ca. 1827, after Prieur.
image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London | CC BY 4.0

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Frontispiece to Hooker’s  Rhododendrons of the Sikkim-Himalaya 1849-51

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

The Rhododendron Dell at Kew. Photo by Andrew McRobb RGB/Kew

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Appearances can be deceptive.  A couple of days ago I  took a train out into what was once the countryside surrounding Lisbon,  hoping to see a garden that I’d mentioned in passing in an earlier post.   Ten minutes stroll from a dreary concrete suburban station I found myself outside a very long largely single story building painted pale blue. My first thought was is this going to be worth the effort?

But as I said appearances can be deceptive. Once through the door everything changed because the palace of Queluz is one of the best Rococo buildings and gardens in Europe.  Sometimes called the Versailles of Portugal  the palace and its gardens were a real surprise.

Behind the unexceptional  street facade were  ornate and fanciful interiors [to put it mildly] while the rear elevations of the palace are equally colourful and playful,  and  overlook a series of very grand gardens containing more statues than I think I’ve ever seen gathered in one place – apart possibly from the sculpture gallery of the V&A or maybe a Victorian cemetery!

Part of the street facade

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