Witches’ hats and ballerinas
Rebecca Gethin
Waxcaps glow on the hilltop
like corals erupted from underground
scented with honey and unguent.
They cluster in a troupe
with attitude and, in tutus
of scarlet, amber, parrot or pink,
bloom in left-alone meadows
of sweet vernal and fescue,
of moss, pignut and wild chives.
Their anatomy is a seam
of hyphae and mycelia
corded with soil particles
to nourish their fruits with enzymes,
elements and lipids
flowing from the centre.
It lies deep in the weave of the land
binding it with subterranean
stitches of shiro tendrils
spreading along the bias,
as they busily digest and become
their own ancestors.
The Science
Waxcaps are grassland fungi of the genus Hygrocybe. They are so-called because their caps look shiny or waxy and, being brightly coloured, they are sometimes known as ‘grassland gems’. Their habitat is declining because they only grow on permanent pasture that has not been disturbed or compacted, nor ‘improved’ with fertiliser or herbicide. Nowadays they seem to favour sloping land as it is less likely to be intensively farmed. Waxcaps are the fruiting bodies of a much larger network of minute tubes or 'mycelium' within the soil. The fungal fruiting bodies only emerge above ground for a relatively short time in the Autumn. Research suggests that they prefer areas with some briophytes (a group of plants that include mosses, liverworts and hornworts), with which they may have a beneficial relationship. The word ‘bias’ seemed appropriate to me because of the threading mycelia underground and it seemed appropriate to carry the other sense of the word in the fungi’s preference for ‘left-alone meadows’ and slopes.
The Poet
Rebecca Gethin has written 5 poetry publications and has been a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor. Messages was a winner in the first Coast to Coast to Coast pamphlet competition. Vanishings has just been published by Palewell Press. She blogs at rebeccagethin.wordpress.com
Next poem: Artificial Intelligence by Marianne Karplus