Wordsworth wrote, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”

Throughout life it has been my lot to enjoy walking in nature. I have wandered off alone since I was quite small. On those rambles I have always had an interest in the most insignificant looking plants. The ones that have all the beauty of those we value en masse are found in florist shops yet the tiny survivors living and dying each year without the aid of nurture or cultivation are the most delicate and robust when left alone.

My first example is not even a plant. It is a lichen. I first noticed these on a cold winter’s day growing on a railing fence in Camperdown. It was lusciously vibrant and woolly. It’s grey green coat was thick as it clung to the southern side of a horizontal rail on a damp winter’s day. These ancient forms of vegetation double in size in the damp air of winter yet it summer they are barely visible and certainly less majestic at that time of year. 

Perhaps even less significant are the fungi. As a kid my end of first term holiday was spent combing paddocks in the search of field mushrooms. I used to collect two types. The first was a brown topped mushroom that I collected from button size to a size equivalent to a broad tea cup. These were the most prized. The easiest to pick was a variety, white in colour, that grew to the size of a dinner plate. These we called horse mushrooms. They were wonderful money makers. It was possible to pick a bucketful in next to no time. 

If it had been raining through the night they were soaked with water and likely to be rejected by Harry Lamb as too wet when I went to sell them. Often I would allow them to dry overnight inside  before attempting to pass them off. I seem to recall earning about 4 shillings a bucket for either type in the early 1950’s,  This was a good money for kids all over the district. In later years the yield dropped as more farmers ploughed up their paddocks, or they started to use super phosphate. Both actions seemed to kill the mycelium that allowed the fungi to spread underground. If the ground was undisturbed we found it had bigger crops each year.  

We were advised by our elders to never pick mushrooms growing under trees, especially pine trees, as each year a new warning would be sent out telling us, for instance,  two people had died  eating poisonous mushrooms. Never eat mushroom looking fungi if it left a stain on your hand or it was orange in colour.  The gills of recommended mushrooms were always brown and never white. I was prompted to write this article because  Claudette Brennan had spent the weekend gathering (and eating) Slippery Jacks and Orange mushrooms under the pine trees at The Heights. My fellow volunteer members were aghast anyone would attempt something so rash.

I guess we were all aware of these dangers spoken of in our childhood. It would take courage to try some of the odd looking members of the fungi family but in this age more varieties are eaten than ever before. Our traipsing in the forest has allowed us to see some most wonderful looking varieties but knowing few are edible we have been content to just look and not eat.

When we moved to Anglesea I just loved walking the trails in the heath. The plants are generally low and many of them barely reach the knee. There are thousands of plants on the heath growing side by side. The most interesting and insignificant plants are the orchid species. Our book on native orchids says about 150 of the 500 orchid species in Australia are indigenous to the area. 

On my first forays into the heath I found many plants the like I had never seen before but the orchid was the most elusive. Discussions with members of ANGAIR (Anglesea and Aries Inlet region group) led us to The late Winston Huggins. He and his late wife had been citizen scientists of the orchid and Winston took Jennie and I on several safaris searching for rare species in our first years there. I was happy to know this was a Sun Orchid,  this a Spider Orchid, that a Nodding Greenhood etc. Winston knew their Latin names  and all the subspecies in which they belonged. 

Over the years we got to discover the time of year they appeared and the locations we were most likely to find them. We had at least three species native to our our block.

I have attached some photos to illustrate this entry.