Mushrooms

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He also served as chairman of the Society for the Protection of London Squares, helping to frustrate the incursions of developers, work for which he was appointed MBE in the 2010 New Year Honours. The artist, photographer and author Roger Phillips’ talents led him in many directions, not all of them predictable, and it is entirely consistent with his roaming, inquisitive spirit that he will be remembered by many as a learned and media-friendly mycologist, a David Attenborough of the mushroom, and as the guru of the foraging movement. He did his national service with the RAF in Canada but resigned his commission on pacifist principles and returned to London, where he worked in a hospital and took a course at the Chelsea School of Art. “Roger was lively and gregarious,” remembers his contemporary Alan Gilchrist, “contributing regularly to theatrical events, and was the art editor of the school’s magazine Concetto.” A friend and fellow conspirator in cultural interventions was Brian Innes, whose band Roger booked for a school ball even before they became the Temperance Seven. Roger was a natural to present TV programmes about nature, and showed how to slow-cook a ham in compost

Despite all the changes he has witnessed at first hand as a result of factory farming, he remains an optimist. He believes not only that we may see a necessary revival in sustainability, but that some of the more miraculous properties of fungi in particular might yet help us to fix the damage already done to the planet. “Fungi have been used to break down oil spills,” he says. “I think they will have a role to play in ridding the world of plastic.” In exchange, this makes it possible for trees and plants to live in poor soils, and in fact, it is the support of the truffle group of fungi that can be found on very poor, limey soils. There are two main groups of fungi: the first I call the Water Carriers, and the second I call the Rubbish Collectors. Both of them are essential to life on earth. The Water Carriers live in symbiosis with flowering plants. It is a trade system in which the mushrooms which do not have chlorophyll, and therefore cannot use sunlight to generate nutrients, receive sugars and other compounds that they need from the tree or plant.

Mushrooms can be the largest organisms on earth, with mycelium spreading over enormous distances. One recorded Honey Fungus in Oregon has been shown to cover in excess of 2,000 acres. In 1975 Roger Phillips began his life’s major work of photographing and publishing pictures of the World’s garden plants. Using modern photographic techniques, Roger set out to develop an encyclopedic collection of books to show the difference between plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals. His first book Wild Flowers of Britain was a huge success, selling 400,000 copies in the first year. He has since written 20 additional volumes (often with his co-author Martyn Rix) selling over 4.5million copies worldwide. Roger has written and presented two major six-part TV series on gardening (BBC & Channel 4). Famed for his ebullient personality and garish red glasses, he has become a well-recognised figure in the world of gardening.

He was managing director of RogersRoses.com from 2001 and his books included Vegetables: The Definitive Guide for Gardenersand The Random House Book of Perennials(both with Martyn Rix), Wild Food, Mushrooms, and The Botanical Garden. In 1975 Roger Phillips began his life’s major work of photographing and publishing pictures of the World’s garden plants. Roger developed an encyclopedic collection of books to show the difference between plants as diverse as mosses, roses, and annuals using modern photographic techniques. Phillips published books about trees and ferns and wild flowers before he got to mushrooms. He didn’t think the publisher at Pan would go for it. The British, he suggests, had always been funny about fungi. While across Europe and beyond natives would be out in fields and forests as if on pilgrimage in mushroom season, in the UK there was no tradition. “We were famous for herbs from medieval times, of course,” says Phillips. “But those books tend to refer to mushrooms as ‘the spit of Jesus’ or ‘the fruit of the devil’. Because they grew up from nowhere overnight they were associated with witchcraft.” Phillips, Roger, Derek Reid, Ronald Rayner, and Lyndsay Shearer. 1981. Mushrooms and other fungi of Great Britain and Europe. London: Pan Books. He shudders at the thought. “We are going to be dust long enough,” he says. And then he brightens. “According to a French mycologist there is a mushroom that grows only on the human brain, in graveyards. I suppose because they are uniquely nutritious.” He laughs at the idea. “I don’t know if it’s a comforting thought – but there it is.” OFMHis entry on the Death Cap, “the most deadly fungus known”, included the alarming information that, if ingested, an initial period of prolonged and violent vomiting and diarrhoea and severe abdominal pain is typically “followed by an apparent recovery, when the victim may ... think his ordeal over. Within a few days death results from kidney and liver failure.” Roger Howard Phillips MBE (16 December 1932 – 15 November 2021) was a British photographer, botanist and writer. [1] Biography [ edit ] He presented two six-part television series, 1994's The Quest for the Rose for BBC Television and, in 1995, The 3,000 Mile Garden for PBS. [2] [3]

Phillips trained at Chelsea School of Art from where he entered a career in advertising culminating in the position of art director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. He left O&M to start a career as a freelance photographer, winning many awards before turning his photographic talents to the world of natural history. Roger t In 1975 Roger Phillips began his life’s major work of photographing and publishing pictures of the World’s garden plants. Using modern photographic techniques, Roger set out to develop an encyclopedic collection of books to show the difference between plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals. His first book Wild Flowers of Britain was a huge success, selling 400,000 copies in the first year. He has since written 20 additional volumes (often with his co-author Martyn Rix) selling over 4.5million copies worldwide. Phillips, Roger, and Jacqui Hurst. 1983. Wild food: [a unique photographic guide to finding, cooking and eating wild plants, mushrooms and seaweed]. London: Pan Books. Roger Phillips is one of the world’s leading mushroom specialists with over 40 years of expertise in studying fungi in the wild. Roger’s book, ‘Mushrooms’, first published in 2006, has been hugely successful, with more than 2 million copies sold worldwide in 7 European languages. He has learned a lot, too, from spending time with a Native American tribe, the Nez Perce, in Idaho, who retain some of the ancient knowledge of hunter-gatherers. Not only did Phillips increase his knowledge of edible tubers, he became friends with an eminently quotable chief: “How long will it take mankind to realise that you cannot eat money?”He is best known as an expert on mushrooms and roses who wrote more than forty books on gardening and wild plants and fungi; many with Martyn Rix. [3] [5] He was also an Honorary Garden Manager at Eccleston Square in London, where he lived, [3] [6] and served as chair of the Society for the Protection of London Squares. [2] Phillips presented or co-presented two television series based on his books on gardening, The Quest for the Rose (1994, BBC Two) and The 3,000 Mile Garden (1995, PBS), in which he and the US gardener Lesley Land compared and contrasted their gardening methods and preferences. The actual fungus is a vast network of very fine fibres, called hyphae, and a mass of hyphae is called mycelium. The single fibres are too fine to be seen with the human eye and thus, infinitely more capable than plant roots of finding water supplies, trace elements and minerals essential to the health of the plant or tree they grow in symbiosis with.

Phillips accepts their compliments modestly while polishing off his stew – a dish I feel I could eat every winter lunchtime and never tire of. There is some discussion of the origin of the chanterelles – Portugal at this time of year – and we then wander to the edge of the market to get a glass of wine and sit and talk about the mulchy beginnings of his first love. Mushrooms and Fungi are the neglected geniuses of the plant world, but they are completely essential to life, the rest of the natural world is dependent on them for their health and viability. Plants for Europe's Graham Spencer said: "So many great books came from Roger Phillips pen and camera. I have several on my shelf, still referred to regularly."Called up to do National Service in the RAF, he was sent to Canada but resigned his commission, declaring himself a pacifist, and worked in a hospital, at the same time enrolling in night classes in painting at the Chelsea School of Art, later completing the full-time course. Those attitudes went surprisingly deep. When he was researching his first mushroom book Phillips was up in Scotland staying on a farm. The farmer was a “tight sod, who charged you extra for hot water and all that”. Phillips was out every day collecting chanterelles. One evening he told the farmer: “You have millions of these in your woods. Put them in a box and send them to France and you will make a small fortune.” The farmer looked at him and said simply: “People shouldnae eat that shite.” “And that was it. That idea was common.” In this group of Water Carriers can be found nearly all the conventional mushrooms with cap, stem and gill or pores. These include many of the best edibles and also the deadly poisonous species. The Rubbish Collectors are no less valuable in the whole ecosystem. They gain their supplies of sugars and other organic matter by breaking down the organic matter in dead wood and leaves, rather than direct from the plants as in symbiosis. Phillips warned against using his guide – or any other – as the sole authority on edible fungi, advising that novices should always have experts identify their finds.