I Have been picking mushrooms in the garden today. They have been popping up in my borders amongst the shrubs and flowers.

I guess that the spores have come in on the woodchip that I use as a mulch to suppress the weeds. Now that we are having all this wet and warm weather the mushrooms are sprouting up all over the place.

I am not the world's best identifier of this type of flora, so wouldn't trust myself to be able to say if the things were edible or not.

I can always remember summer camping holidays as a child. We would spend mornings foraging in the Scottish pine forests with my mother (a botanist, so knows what she's doing) looking for ceps, field and boletus mushrooms.

She would fry them all up over the gas stove in the evening, and we would eat them without giving a second thought as to whether any of them were harmful or not.

I tried looking them up in the book. Now, they could be one of the Agaricus edible ones, but they are not growing in a ring, and I can't detect a smell of almonds.

They are slightly too brown to be the St George's mushroom, so called because it appears around April 23. That's a shame because that would have made a very good accompaniment to any chicken dish, and especially chicken casserole.

On the other hand it could be a Yellow Stainer, which accounts for over 50 per cent of mushroom poisoning cases. This looks quite similar to the ordinary field mushroom, but will come out in a bright yellow bruise if banged.

It's definitely not a Fly Agaric, which must be one of the most easily identifiable toadstools. They are the ones with a bright red cap covered in white foamy spots.

The toxins attack the nervous system which can produce severe intoxication, hallucination and in some cases coma and death. Witches and seers in olden days used to use these properties to induce trance-like states.

From these they would make their predictions and prophesies (assuming they came out of them unharmed).

You can see why, contrary to popular belief, witches tended to have a fairly short life expectancy. The Sami people of Lapland use toadstools to drug and tame their reindeer.

It's not the most dangerous mushroom though. In this country that honour belongs to the aptly named Death Cap. This accounts for the most number of fatal fungus poisonings each year.

Only one cap is needed to cause death, and a single cap could kill several people. Years of research have failed to come up with an antidote to the toxin. The only means of survival is through having your blood screened through charcoal.

Even then you may suffer liver and kidney failure. Not very pleasant.

I decided that the risk was far too great. I have cleared the garden of all the remaining foreign fungus. They may have been edible. They may have been completely toxic. At the end of the day they were not part of my planting scheme and therefore categorised as weeds and consigned to the bonfire.

Gardeners Questions

MR Harrison has written to me saying that he bought a summer flowering clematis from Harrogate show. He has built two five-foot trellis pyramids for them and wants to know if they will grow in pots or if he has to have them planted in the ground.

Most clematis do exceedingly well as container plants, and summer flowering ones especially so. They like to be planted deep into the soil and prefer shade at the roots but sun at the top. The trellis placed on top of the pots would ensure the ideal conditions.

Unlike the spring Montana types, these clematis should only reach the top of the trellis in one season's growth. The flowers will appear on the current years' growth, so it's not wise to keep cutting it down through the summer. Come January though you can chop the whole lot down to eight to 12 inches from the surface of the soil. Make sure that at least once a year you scrape the top two inches of soil out of the pot and replace with fresh compost.

For further hints and tips, answers to horticultural questions or general garden chatter then tune in to 'Ask about Gardening' on BBC Radio Cleveland on FM95 between 12.00-2.00 with Brigid Press and co-presenter Tim Ellingford.

To send your questions to Brigid to be answered in The Northern Echo, email her at brigidpress67.freeserve.co.uk or write to her care of Nature's World, Ladgate Lane, Acklam, Middlesbrough.

Published: 07/06/2003