Mushrooms

Product Information

Soft covers in very good condition, contents bright and clean, illustrations colourful, binding sound, a very neat and tidy copy. Roger became a friend of my family in the late 1960s, when he was working as a food photographer, capturing, for magazines and partworks, glistening images of both natural produce and exquisitely presented meals.

Each year he joins the musician and DJ Cerys Matthews at her Good Life Experience festival in north Wales and takes a few hundred people out into the woods. But he was just as happy in less grand settings, regularly heading mushroom-collecting walks and other foraging expeditions. That pioneering volume, first published in 1981 – with its vivid description and photographs of hundreds of varieties and stages of growth – has enabled two generations of foragers to pick and eat with confidence. Roger Phillips has written the best mushroom book I know: the sublime taxonomic accuracy of his descriptions and photographs, combined with an evangelical and infectious passion for the subject, will make an instant mycophile of anyone who picks it up. Photograph: Sophie Davidson Roger Phillips tended the gardens of Eccleston Square, London, where he lived, for more than 40 years.

Ascomycetes: Morels; Saddle fungi; Cup fungi; Ear fungi; Club-shaped fungi; Finger and disc fungi; Truffles; Sports and crusts.

There are a few mushrooms that fruit in spring whilst the ground is still wet from winter before it dries out from the summer sun. In 99% of cases, fungi growing on wood is not in any way harmful to the plants, but there are one or two exceptions: Honey Fungus ( Armillaria Mellea)being one. Basidiomycetes: Mushrooms with gills; Mushrooms with primitive gills; Mushrooms and fungi with pores; Fungi with spines; Stomach fungi; Bird's nest fungi; Stinkhorns; Club and spindle fungi; Coral fungi; Jelly fungi. A beautiful and comprehensive guide to mushroom identification with over 1,250 detailed photographs of mushrooms and other fungi.

Educated at St Christopher School, Letchworth, a progressive vegetarian boarding school, he was introduced to the joys of foraging blackberries by his father – “total bliss to him – and to me” – and mushrooms when he was sent during the war to live with his grandparents at their dairy farm in Hertfordshire. The combination of Roger Phillips’s accurate colour photography and design flair with the botanical expertise of Martyn Rix is a winning one.

He was Honorary Garden Manager at Ecclestone Square in London and in the 2010 New Year's Honours Listwas awarded the MBE for services to London Garden Squares.This introduced readers to the delights of the now ubiquitous rocket, as well as ceps and alexanders (a parsley-like vegetable brought to Britain by the Romans, said to be delicious cooked in butter and black pepper). There are also colour photos of every mushroom along with the description, which makes identification more intuitive. The culmination of over thirty years work, this authoritative and superbly illustrated reference work is packed with the most up-to-date information and original photographs.