Giant Fungi Models in Botanic Garden

Three new fungi sculptures have been specially made for this year’s Wales (UK) Fungus Day that is being held in the Garden on Sunday October 12^th. Created by two Brechfa-based artists Tina Ashdown and Laura Vettori, the wooden structures make large the tiny fungi that feed off, and rot, wood.

Bonnet (Mycena sp.) mushrooms have bell shaped caps on long delicate stems that you’ll find growing out of the top of fallen logs in our Pont Felin Gat woodland. The fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) is the iconic white-scaled red topped mushroom which artists and storytellers have used to decorate their depictions of a magical fairy world. Least well known, but perhaps even more amazing, is the fluted bird’s nest fungus (Cyathus striatus): this begins as a brown ball that opens up gradually to reveal a white interior containing spore sacs that look like beautiful bird’s eggs. Tina  and Laura, with help from visitors to the Wales Tree Festival, have inscribed the words of a poem onto their fluted bird’s nest fungus. This newly commissioned Welsh and English language poem has been written by Ammanford based Eisteddfod Bard Einir Jones, who will be making her first public reading of the poem on Wales Fungus Day, next to the sculptures which are sited in the Garden’s Trawscoed Wood. The sculptures will then form part of the Garden’s Magical Mystery Tour, a children-centred leaflet that takes families around the odder parts of the Garden.