Have mushrooms had a bad year in the media? Absolutely yes

Are they still beautiful and worthy of our admiration and interest? Also yes!  

They are endlessly beautiful and fascinating and sharing that love with children can be fun and useful.

There is something in fungi that calls up the wonder, magic and joy. 

The eye catching colours, the way they form little colonies or tiny umbrellas. It’s easy to imagine toadstools housing tiny and elusive creatures. 

When I was younger we had a toadstool smurf house with a beautiful roof, door and windows. I think this is probably where my love for toadstools began and when I had my own children I wanted to recreate some of this love. 

I searched for old episodes of the Smurfs on youtube - and another show that I had loved called ‘David the Gnome’ that holds secret small people, who ride on foxes and are friends with other forest animals. 

Who can say whether those shows have aged well? But those little seeds of fantasy have stayed with me and I think that remembering these little moments from your childhood can help bring something to your own parenting experience. In finding things that are enjoyable for yourself to play, read, and talk about can make magical shared moments for both you and your child/ren.

Some ideas for bringing toadstools and mushrooms into play could be creating a play corner inside for rainy days with some toadstools you’ve painted together or made out of air dry clay - add some fences, blocks, rabbits or fairies and you have a small world of wonder. 

This is also a great time of year to go out and spot some mushrooms, they’re often growing in backyards or driveways, at local parks or if you’re up for a day out - bushwalks in the Otways will usually deliver many beautiful specimens! Spotting these beauties in the wild can be a good time to talk about how we love to look at them, about why we won’t eat them, (much like we would talk about other plants or bugs that we shouldn’t eat!), how they help trees talk to each other and how fungi are actually more closely related to people than plants!

An example of a mushroom that is great to observe with children is the shaggy inkcap. They change quickly as they grow and then devour themselves in just a few days - the photos below were taken a day apart.