Things have been quite wet and gray here the last couple of weeks, especially in the mornings, and today was no different. Overcast skies, damp to puddling ground just about everywhere, and more and more winter mushrooms growing from anywhere you could imagine. No dead thing in the forest, including the mushrooms themselves, could claim to be free of some sort of fungal stage of decomposition and recycling into the ecosystem.
The fruiting bodies are getting more colorful and vigorous by the day -- I am still waiting, though, to see if we get any of the monstrous Amanitas we got in the Clump this late summer. There are certainly some interesting blue-green-gray fellows coming up in the back, and the Red Russula have returned to the piney areas. Deceivers or False Chanterelles of some kind are coming up around the old removed Water Oak stump near the southeast corner for the Big House, and of course the Log Pile is crawling with Oysters and Bracket mushrooms of all sorts.
Very little new plant growth, at least of natives, except for the first Violet rosettes starting to pop out along the driveway and some Jessamine freshening up for its debut in January -- the first big flowers of the year.
