A few good rains gets the fungi going, and mycologist Katie Syme. Katie has recently completed a fungi and truffle hunt on Bush Heritage’s Chereninup Creek Reserve. Here is a selection of the wonderful specimens she found.

Just as the work of earlier botanists has opened our eyes to the exceptional richness of south-western Australia, so Katie’s work is uncovering a significant unrealised dimension to that richness – the decomposers that seem to sit somewhere between the plant and animal kingdoms. Katie’s words from this 2004 interview give a glimpse into the excitement of the work underway: “The thrill of the hunt! I just grab my bucket, my waxed lunch wrap, some plastic containers, and my trusty truffle rake, and off I go and collect a few species … I’ve made 1302 fully documented collections so far. Anybody who looks for fungi in Australia would have found new species – can’t help it because so little is known about them, so I find that really exciting. I can just open my front door, walk down the road, find a new species of fungi, come back and have a cup of tea.”