Watch out! Shooting fungus about

Last month, I managed a little break up in my beloved north Norfolk among the wild geese and massed wading bird. Such a great place to clear your head of everything but nature.

Of course, I never miss the opportunity to visit anything to do with wildlife gardening, so I grabbed my chance to pop in to the lovely Natural Surroundings south of Blakeney and Cley.

It is run by Anne and Simon Harrap - you might have one of their excellent photographic flower books on your shelves, which I can heartily recommend.

Natural Surroundings is...well, I'll let their entrance sign explain better than I can:

You can see that as well as gardens, there is a nursery. Most garden centres and nurseries have little to offer me because so few grow their plants in peat-free compost, but at Natural Surroundings, it is 'kid in sweet shop' time because they resolutely grow without peat.

The chance to browse polytunnnels and plant stalls full of peat-free plants that are chosen specifically for their wildlife value is, frankly, heaven.

Plus you get plenty of helpful signs along the way to explain which wildlife the plants will benefit.

Doesn't it make your heart sing? The good news is that, even though peat-free nurseries are still in the minority, the number is on the rise. If you don't have the chance to visit Natural Surroundings in the near future, check out the excellent list of other outlets that Nic Wilson maintains here.

So, what has all this got to do with shooting fungi? Well, I was delighted to bump into Anne Harrap while I was browsing, we had a good chinwag about things, and she happened to point out this in some of her plant pots:

It's the Field Bird's-nest Fungus, about a centimetre across. What a curious and enchanting thing. The spores are contained in the little 'eggs' in the cup. So do they shoot? Sadly, no, although their means of dispersal is still pretty cute! They are bounced out by raindrops.

But, don't worry, I do have an explosive finale to today's blog. Anne was able to show me this, also growing on compost (peat-free, of course).

It is even smaller than the Bird's-nest Fungus - only two or three millimetres across - but it is a dramatic little package. It is sometimes called the Shooting Star Fungus, or alternatively the Cannonball Fungus.

Once the orange cup has burst open to reveal the 'cannonball' in the middle (technically called a peridiole, if you'd like that for Scrabble), the lining of the cup absorbs water until it can hold itself no more. The lining turns itself inside out with an explosive ping that sends the cannonball flying up to six metres through the air.

In wildlife-friendly gardening, it is so often the little things that are the most amazing.