![]() ![]() Luckily for enthusiasts, rare fungi often grow together. “Some years it appears, usually it doesn’t,” he says. Colorful wave crashing full#In full bloom, violet coral lasts anywhere from a few days to a week, Dines says. Colorful wave crashing Patch#The violet coral, shown here in a patch of grass, looks like it belongs underwater. As a result, it’s difficult to find violet coral unless you’re actively looking for it. And when weather conditions are less than ideal, meaning a dry spring or summer, fungi remain underground, with no above-ground blooms in the fall. ![]() In northern Wales, where Dines lives, pristine patches of pasture are common, but they’ve all but disappeared from lowland England, Wales, and Scotland, he says. The small pastures that do remain tend to be fields that are too steep or small for intensive development with fertilizers and pesticides, though the occasional grazing pony may wander through. Ancient, species-rich grasslands like this once sprawled across England and Wales, but nearly 97 percent were lost in the 20th century, according to a 1987 study in Biological Conservation. The fungus, like other vibrant waxcap fungi, grows best in ancient pastures, which is the British term for grassland that has not been plowed, sprayed, reseeded, or fertilized for decades. Trevor Dinesīeyond merely looking out of place, the violet coral is rare due to its persnickety growing requirements, Dines says. Pink waxcaps, a type of gilled fungus, were spotted this fall. A wet spring, warm summer, and rainy autumn have turned Welsh meadows into reefscapes. He’d been searching all day, in hot pursuit of not only violet coral, but also a bevy of other bizarre fungi that have popped up in the UK this year. People report sightings a few times each year in northern England and Scotland, and Dines, who works for the charity Plantlife, had never seen it before. The fungus in question, aptly named the violet coral, is a relatively uncommon sight in the United Kingdom. “We were about to give up on the search when I noticed it nearly under my feet,” Dines writes in an email. It looked as though a piece of coral had been plucked from some tropical reef and transplanted to the less-colorful grasslands of Wales. It wasn’t an old Viking relic or rare coin, but an almost gaudy fungus. One afternoon this October, as the light was fading along the coast of Wales, botanist Trevor Dines found treasure in an ancient pasture. ![]()
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