This week we took sandwiches and coffee to eat our lunch beside the ford on the road beside Warren House Plantation near Clapper Bridge, and on the way there we stopped to photograph a lovely red tree inside someone’s driveway. Some of the trees are a sight to see, but the down side of having trees in your garden is that when their leaves fall it means a whole lot of raking up to do.

In the past I have always found plenty of different mushrooms here on the mossy banks beside the ford and the first one I spotted this week was a lone hedgehog fungus – Hydnum repandum. The cap was a creamy yellow colour about 6cms wide and underneath the cap, instead of gills there are spines, a feature that gives the mushroom its common name.

My wife shouted to me and asked if I fancied a fried egg with my lunch as she had found some Lepiota ignivolvata mushrooms that did look a little like fried eggs in a pan. These are commonly found in woodland and on moss covered hedgerows, but I turned down the offer of eating them.

However, the king of mushrooms is the Boletus edulis, otherwise known as the Penny Bun, but as with the hedgehog fungus I was only able to find one. This mushroom is referred to by television chefs as ‘ceps’ or ‘porcinis’, which are their French and Italian names, but why not use their British name or is it not grand enough for them?

Some years ago I used to pick the penny buns when I could find them, slice them up and dry them and keep them in a jar. Then they were used in the kitchen in several dishes, although I could never resist uncapping and taking a long sniff from the jar. I think these mushrooms were used to make soup that was sold in cans by a well-known firm.

Walking along the road that leads back to Warren House we saw several little herb robert – Geranium robertianum - flowers growing among the vegetation along the hedge. The stems and leaves of this plant turn red at this time of the year and it is said that the name, Robert, is after the mischievous elf, Robin Goodfellow.

I have not seen very many wasps on the wing this year, in fact I have not come across any wasps nests either. Last year I found half a dozen nests; but when we got back from our trip to the ford there were lots of these yellow and black stripey insects feeding on a castor oil shrub that is growing outside our back door.

I counted around a dozen wasps buzzing around the shrub and I wondered where they have been all summer.