Farewell to a fun guy

For once, that corny old pun fits the bill.

This is my salute to mycologist and wild food expert Roger Phillips who died last month at the age of 83. It was Roger who opened the world of foraging to countless people and enabled them to identify plants, trees  and fungi by means of the  clear photographic images which accompanied the text. His first book, Mushrooms, published in 1981, has been my go-to reference book for all those 40 years and his Wild Food (1983) has inspired many experiments. He insisted on not just illustrating the  species but preparing and cooking the recipes in situ so that the resulting photographs  display the dishes au naturel  in the environment in which the ingredients grew.
Roger Phillips was a colourful character whose mycelia, as it were, connected with the worlds of art, music, photography, history, horticulture, London squares and native American culture. There's an obituary here and the BBC R4 'Last Words' programme included him, after Anthony Scher, here (starts at 12.52)

The photo is of Schizophyllum commune, on its frequent habitat of a silage bale. I've blipped it twice before*. It's not normally regarded as edible although I did unearth a recipe. It's also one of the few fungi that can regenerate after desiccation. Here it's casting its spores to the wind as any ancient mycologist would wish to do.

* Here and here.