The fungi winning hearts and minds on forest floors

One day, the forest floor might be filled with leaf litter, soft decomposing logs and tiny tree saplings. The next, the O logs flush with gilled oyster mushrooms, rivers of brightly coloured waxgills or puffballs - white orbs, as big as footballs, suddenly appear in the undergrowth.

- Gabi Lardies AUCKLAND

Such is the curious world of New Zealand's fungi, which like the island nation's flora and fauna, have evolved in isolation into more than 20,000 unusual and endemic species. Most fungi are too small to be visible, and of those that you can see, most aren't mushrooms - they're lichen, moulds, mildews, rusts and smuts.

They grow in a mix of shapes and sizes, from delicate light-green wisps and glistening jellies, to bright orange lattices and gnarled black tongues. The giant puffball can grow more than a metre in diameter, according to Liv Sisson, the author of the field guide Fungi of Aotearoa. She said they have a habit of appearing out of nowhere.

"I was walking down this path, where days before there was nothing. I turned a corner and there were 20 of them, all the size of my head. It was like these gigantic soccer balls had fallen out of the sky," she said.