Miniature Gardens of a Different Sort

By Mwillis
Last weekend I went for a walk on a nearby stretch of heathland - Velmead Common, on the outskirts of my home town, Fleet.

This is a great place to see fungi. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, of many different types. In this post I want to show you some of the smallest ones; the ones you have to look for really carefully.
Take this for example. Some tiny "mushrooms" growing on a fir-cone. The fir-cone itself was probably only 4 or 5 cm long:

I saw several similar ones:

But once you start looking, fungi and mosses are all around...









Don't you think they look like miniature gardens?

To get idea of the scale of these fungi, just compare them to the size of a pine-needle, which you see in almost all of the photos, since this area of heath is thickly studded with pine trees: