The Guardian March 2022

The magic of mushrooms: how they connect the plant world

After years in the wilderness, fungi are finally getting the attention they deserve from gardeners, scientists, designers and doctors

Turkeytail fungus (Trametes versicolor) in Snowdonia, Wales. Photograph: Nature Picture Library/Alamy

Joe Perkins, like most gardeners, has typically been more animated by what’s going on above the ground than below it. The quality of the soil was important, no question, but what was really going on down there felt mysterious and impenetrable. As for fungi, it usually meant one thing in a garden, and that wasn’t good news.

“On a domestic level, our relationship and understanding of fungi in the past has very much been that it’s something about decay, it’s about disease, and it’s something that we don’t particularly want in our gardens,” says Perkins, a 45-year-old landscape architect based in Sussex, who won three awards at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2019 with a garden he created for Facebook. “It’s fair to say that, as gardeners, we’ve not always fully understood – and I still don’t – the importance of these systems.”

What changed for Perkins was reading research by the American mycologist and fungi guru Dr Paul Stamets and British biologist Merlin Sheldrake’s 2020 revelatory book, Entangled Life. This year, the tech giant, now called Meta, has commissioned him to make another Chelsea garden and Perkins has decided to build an immersive environment that celebrates the symbiotic exchange between soil, fungi and plants.

“Our relationship with fungi is changing, and I think it will be an irreversible change,” he predicts. “You find yourself getting caught up in all the huge implications of it. It’s a totally separate kingdom to plants and animals, and it’s possibly the biggest kingdom about which we know very, very little. If you imagine how the Victorian plant hunters felt when they were discovering all these new plants back in the 18th and 19th century, it’s almost like that. It’s the new frontier, isn’t it?”

Read the full article here.