SOME
PLANTS—RARE by
AND
JANET C . N .
A RARE FUNGUS FOUND IN
OTHERWISE
WILLIS
SUFFOLK
MR. S. C. Porter writes " Mr. Humphrey Pease sought identification of a fungus growing on an Elm trunk in his gar den at Sudbourne. Mr Pease's description indicated a young State of Volvariella bombycina (Schaef ex. Fr.). I sent a rough sketch of what it should look like in a few days if it was what I thought. It developed as suggested. Mr. Mayfield listed it as an uncommon species in his Suffolk list (Trans. Vol. VI, p. 205) under the name of Volvaria bombycina (Schaef. Fr.). (Mr. Mayfield records it as found by himself at Needham Market.) " The first name is that used in the New Check List of British Agarics and Boleti (Trans. B.M.S. Supplement, June, i960)." Mr. Porter continues : " I have never found it myself in more than 25 years of hunting, and at the recent B.M.S. Annual Foray here in Birmingham I found only one or two of the country's best mycologists who had ever met any Volvariella (nine spp. in the list) ; it would seem rather more -than uncommon, in fact rare. I suppose it is no more than a coincidence that the day after replying to Mr. Pease I found two specimens myself on a beech tree in a wood near Bromsgrove where I do a lot of fungusing ". Mr. Pease in reply to a letter from me (J.C.N.W.) says he knows nothing of Fungi, but does notice other things besides birds. He did not know when he saw this fungus as a silky white egg, about the size of a goose egg, in a brownish egg-cup that it would develop a stem and a mushroom-type top. It grew on a fallen elm trunk, cut down a year ago. Since hearing from me, he has bought " The Observers' Book of Common Fungi " in which this fungus is not listed or figured. Polyporus lucidus, Fr. Mr. Simpson has found the rare Lacquered Polypore on a tree stump in a wood at Thurlow last April. He has found it also at Great Blakenham and Stutton. It is of a shiny black, both blade and stalk. OXALIS SPECIES IN
SUFFOLK
Many members have asked for the name of a terrible little pest in our gardens in the Ipswich and Woodbridge area. I could only say it was an Oxalis, but now I have füll information about it from Dr. D. P. Young, the authority on the genus. It is Oxalis corymbosa. T h e leaf is palmate with three leaflets, the flower lilac-pink with darker veins in a " contracted cyme " of three to six flowers. Leaves and flower stems rise from a greenish bulb which has loosely attached to it a Cluster of tiny brown bulbils— so small that as Dr. Young says in his account of it in Watsonia