By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

The Wildlife Gardeners have had enough of cutting mixed hedgerows. We want to get out. It’s September, it has been raining, it’s warm, it must be time for mushrooms!

We headed to woodlands on the Surrey/Kent border where we had surreptitiously followed a wicker-basket-and-knife-bearing German couple last year. And we were not disappointed. The first fungi were entertaining rather than edible. Just what are these funny little grey Halma-piece shaped mushrooms?

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And this beautiful shining white one looks tempting:

...until you notice the volva (cup-shaped sheath) at its base. Although a volva is visible on the edible Caesar’s mushroom (Amanita caesarea), deadly Death Caps (Amanita phalloides) and Destroying Angels (Amanita virosa) have volvae, and for that reason I wouldn’t consider touching this mushroom. By the speckledy crackling on its cap, I’m guessing that this too is an Amanita species, and if one of our readers ID’d it as a Destroying Angel I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

But all was not poison and destruction. As we wandered deep into the wood through bracken and wild bilberry bushes, we came across the occasional oak tree among the beeches and pines. And under these, we found the ultimate mushroom hunters’ prize: ceps!

Ceps, porcini or penny bun mushrooms (Boletus edulis) are big, meaty, earthy, utterly delicious mushrooms, beloved of Italians and foodies at London’s Borough Market (who pay £25 per kilo for them). I had never seen such beautiful specimens as these, even though the slugs and woodlice had nibbled the caps and stalks. Suddenly, there was a shriek of delight from a patch of bracken:

Yes, ceps really do grow this big. Now, with all this natural gastronomic bounty, the temptation is to fill your basket to the brim. We do, however, heed the responsible mushroom-gatherers’ mantra: ‘Leave the babies and the elderly and take two-thirds of the rest’. The enormous cep was quite mature, so we replanted this venerable old lady where we found her so she could continue spreading her spores for next year. We picked enough ceps for a couple of decent risottos and then headed back home.

So thrilled were we at our boletus bounty that the stunning yellow chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius), usually a mushrooming prize in themselves, were almost an afterthought. I’ve come across the orange false chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca) before and left it because it is described as at best inedible, at worst poisonous. But our chanterelles ticked all the boxes in my Mushrooms: River Cottage Handbook No.1:

• Bright yellow
• Not true gills but wrinkles under the cap, dividing into pairs
• Smell of apricots
• Found in oak, beech and pine woodland
• Often in moss
• Late summer
• Looks like photo

These were so very different from the false chanterelles that we picked them with confidence. Then I read an article about Nicholas Evans (author of The Horse Whisperer) and his wife requiring kidney transplants after eating poisonous mushrooms they mistook for chanterelles. However, if you look at the mushroom they ate (Cortinarius speciosissimus) these are certainly not the yellow mushrooms in my picture.

So a large cep risotto (courtesy of an Antonio Carluccio recipe) appeared on the WG dinner table last night:

Chanterelles on toast (following furious ID cross-checking) are today’s delicacy. And for the Junior Wildlife Gardeners? Fish fingers. “We don’t like mushrooms.” Sigh.