His fascination with fungi began in childhood. Merlin Sheldrake, a mycologist who studies underground fungal networks, carries us easily into these questions with ebullience and precision. And when we look closely, we meet large, unsettling questions. We can use them in numerous ways (drugs, cooking, even furniture building). Fungi can eat most rubbish, and even oil spills. Ninety per cent of all plants depend on fungi for minerals. The symbiotic merging of algae and fungi to form lichens enabled the rootless ancestors of all our plants to emerge from water. Their interaction with other matter has played an essential role in making the world we inhabit. In these places, fungi are not merely present. Mostly, they come to our notice as mushrooms, moulds, wood-rot, infections and antibiotics but, invisibly, they are inside us and all around us.įungi live in all kinds of organisms, on surfaces, in and below the soil, in the air, in water, in deep ocean floors and inside solid rock. His statement is spectacularly true of fungi. “W hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” So said the nature writer John Muir.
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