[.ca] Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard: The Mysterious World of ... (ISBN 0195171586)

Wow!:
Wow! I never thought I_d enjoy a book on fungi this much. Parts of it are not a particularly easy read, but the information it contains is mind blowing. Forget terrorists; if fungi and mold decided to take out the human race it would be no contest. We tend not to think of fungi as being a very important part of our world. We might occasionally have mushrooms on pizza or steak, we might notice fungi growing on an old tree or on something that has been kept too long in the refrigerator, but that_s about it. In fact fungi has a vast influence in our world, from breaking down fallen trees in the forest to making our bread and beer. Have you ever wondered how dandruff was formed? Guess what plays a major role. The writer, who presents often bizarre information with wit and style, reminds us that one fungi, covering 2000 acres in Oregon, is thought to be the world_s largest living organism. Even the more prosaic information comes to life in this book - I enjoyed his description of the speed a spore is catapulted from a gill. Some of the most interesting sections are the mini-biographies of scientists who have researched fungi and added to our knowledge of them. There was Buller, for instance, a professor whose students called him _Uncle Reggie_, and Ingold who found a totally unknown kind of fungus in water. There are now over 300 species of Ingoldian fungi known and in fall you can find about 20,000 of them in every litre of brook water. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the natural world. You_ll need to expend a little effort reading the more scholarly parts of it, but you_ll learn some amazing stuff about fungi, mold and the scientists who discovered them.

A Colorful Account:
This is a charming personal take on what most people think of as a charmless subject _ fungi. The author teaches in a university botany department. These days it_s clear that fungi are actually more closely related to animals than they are to plants, but they have always been thought of as a vampirish offshoot of the plant kingdom, so to botany departments they go. This is not really a primer on fungal structure and function, but it does manage to quickly give us a feel for the basics. Fortunately, it is possible to get to the fungal forefront, as it were, relatively quickly. These are fairly simple creatures, as creatures go. (Of course, the simplest cell is complex beyond our most complicated machines.) They are more colonies (or rugged individuals) than multicellular beasts, and most of the action centers in figuring out how they reproduce, and the cocktail of chemicals they use to go where no fungus has gone before. In this book the author talks about a range of topics, such as human and animal fungal pathogens, how the different kinds of fungi make a living, fungal _sex_, poisonous mushrooms, and so on. But he also profiles some of the more eccentric (and productive) researchers in the field. In the course of the book, in many ways, he profiles himself as well. Our author turns out to be a thoroughly engaging sort, humanistic and unpretentious. You_ll like him, and learn something about mushrooms, molds, and mycologists.