Give us a clue

Can you explain what hair ice, cramp balls and pillow mounds are? If not, don’t worry–naturalist John Wright has all the answers to our most unusual countryside mysteries

- John Wright

IT must have been in 1956 when my grandmother announced her intention to rise early the next morning to pick mushrooms from the field near our Hampshire village. ‘They only grow overnight, so I need to be there before anyone else,’ she declared. Born in 1896, this was a girl of the Wiltshire countryside, so I presumed she knew what she was talking about. Still, it seemed odd, even to your then five-year-old correspondent. How could anything grow that fast? The whole business worried me for decades.

This conundrum was to be the first of many that have attended my countryside walks over the years. I was destined never to rest when confronted by a mysterious lump on a leaf, the centre of a flower that should have been pollen-yellow, but was black, strange mounds of grassed-over soil, endless holes in the ground for no apparent reason and the massive terraces that march up the chalk hills of southern England.

I am by no means alone in this lifelong obsession and, like every obsessive, wonder at those who do not share my preoccupation. Some people pass by everything, examine nothing, question nothing and waste their time on trivial matters such as earning a living and looking after the children. I jest, of course, but relatively few rural wanderers know what a plant gall is when they see one, or a rust or smut fungus, or could name or explain many or any of the half-dozen or so types of twiggy/lumpy constructions that they observe clinging to trees.