Species #3: Sea Purslane

On the 10th June this year, I visited the Rye Harbour nature reserve, managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust. There I met Sarah, who works with the Trust and who kindly agreed to show me around the reserve, in preparation for a walk we have planned to co-lead. Cycling down from the town of Rye into the reserve was a pretty pleasant experience, in spite of the inexorable showers to follow. I could taste the salinity of the waters in the air, the iodine of algae. There were linnets fluttering in hedges of sea buckthorn, their silvery undersides a sign of what would eventually emerge, their cherished vibrant, orange berries.

I met Sarah at the Reserve’s hub, where I prematurely sat myself down amongst a group of retired bird watchers, who were waiting for the volunteer lead. I apologised and moved myself to the children’s painting table, carrying my comically large coffee which was overflowing on my tray, when Sarah greeted me warmly. She suggested a circular walk of the reserve and I was immediately keen. ‘I hope you’ve brought waterproof trousers’ she smiled. Of course I was ill prepared for the caprice of coastal weather and laughed off my regret. 

We walked over to the nearest bird watching hide. I conceded my lack of birding knowledge, as I ruffled the firm leaves of sea kale, which Sarah quickly noticed, commenting that the plant was going to seed and was especially important as a food source for the birds. Offering me a pair of binoculars, which were instantly more superior than the one’s I used for stargazing when I was younger, Sarah pointed out the birds she spotted on the salt marsh with ease. Subtle distinctions between sandwich and common terns were lost on me, but soon I accumulated the nuanced perception requisite, sandwich terns with a cap that looked more like waxed hair than a beanie.

I spotted oystercatchers and we spoke about the previously extinct avocet, now wading on the marsh in healthy numbers, an emblem for the RSPB. In the far distance, way beyond the pools where herons and egrets stood still as ice, Sarah pointed to the rather eery looking Mary Stanford Lifeboat House. Recounting the local history I was ignorant of, she spoke of the 17 crewmen who sailed on an early morning winter’s day in 1928, to save a Latvian ship said to have capsized. The crewmen never returned from sea, unbeknownst that the ship had already been saved. All of their bodies were found, apart from one, some of them initially spotted by a small boy collecting driftwood.

By the time we reached the beach, where the walking path became shingle, my trousers were utterly soaked by rainfall and sea spray alike. Sarah offered to walk me back the way we came. I said I was fine either way, as I didn’t want to drag her around in the wet weather. She reassured me that she was more than used to the conditions, better prepared than I was, and could probably sense in my expression my urge to learn more about the harbour. She smiled and pretty much straight away started referring to the teasel plant growing on the shingle, a semi-carnivorous plant that drowned the insects that landed in small pools of water collected in basins along its stem. This was a plant Charle’s Darwin’s son Francis studied, who hypothesised the carnivorous nature of the plant, which putatively absorbs the organic bodies of the insects, a phenomenon still contested today.

Along the coastal grasses growing on the edges of the reserve, Sarah pointed to the various orchids, including pyramidl and common spotted. We munched on black mustard flowers, as we spoke about the challenges of coastal foraging. As an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific interest), the Rye Harbour is protected and therefore technically prohibits foraging. Sarah conceded, ‘It’s a grey area, I was a professional forager for years. We can’t really encourage foraging, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen and it also doesn’t mean we wouldn’t ever turn a blind eye’. We agreed that foraging still occupies an ambiguous place in the world of conservation. Its certainly something someone can be accredited in, but this never means that it doesn’t face seemingly intractable challenges. Bird watching might be considered a more acceptable and normative nature based hobby, mainly because it upholds a certain distance between us and the nature we are appreciating. There is a fine line to foraging, where the desire to appreciate can become an ostensibly rapacious act.

As we returned to the reserve’s hub, we were met with the whirring noise coming from a machine, attached with a large vacuum like a hoover. Effectively it was, its function to clean the salt marsh and estuary after Southern Water leaked innumerable bio-beads into the water ways. A clean-up that could take years to expunge the marshlands from chemicals and heavy metals. Under the machine, I noticed the sea purslane, which stretched out onto the estuary, its glossy oval leaves attached to thick red stems. ‘You can take some if you like’ Sarah said, noticing the look of wonder I failed to downplay. ‘It pairs great with fish’. ‘Are you sure that’s okay?’. Sarah nodded, ‘A few leaves won’t hurt’. ‘ I sometimes let the kids nibble on the raw ones, but with the spill you’ll want to wash and cook them properly’. She left me to pick some of the plants, their stems tough and hard to harvest. A handful would suffice, a naturally salty and deliciously wild accompaniment, to an otherwise domestic meal.

Species #2: Dryad’s saddle

Foraging is not always bountiful. Though mushroom enthusiasts may be accustomed to witnessing images littered on online forums, showing off baskets of highly prized species, abundant porcini, chanterelle and wood blewits for example, on many forays and foraging walks I have returned home empty handed, no matter how promising the conditions were. At certain times of year, in tandem with requisite spells of weather, the forager may anticipate the emergence of a particular species of mushroom. In April, we may expect the troops of white convex caps to subtly arise from the dewy grass of a football field or golf course. That is, the St Georges mushroom, (Calocybe gambosa) which often makes a prolific appearance, the harbinger of a plentiful spring. 

This year, though, the St Georges mushroom did not arise in abundance, certainly in the South East of England at least, and this was due to the ceaselessly dry weather experienced in the weeks of April 2026. The culprit of climate change lingers like a miasma, the capricious patterns of irregular weather becoming ever more normative and indeed expected. Soon, we might not expect particular species of plants and mushrooms to arrive at certain times of year at all; we may even come to expect other species in lieu, like tropical birds being sighted in warmer parts of England for the first time, or perhaps, grimly, nothing at all. Expectation and anticipation is how we come to intuitively recognise global warming, as bird migrations, crop yields, broadleaf tree cycles and other phenological markers that we may experience are altered and in turn, confound our own expectations of the unravelling events that unfold contingently each year.

The dryad's saddle mushroom, also known as pheasant's back (Cerioporus squamosus) is a fungus I'd expect to notice in late spring/early summer. On a ramble in Coney woods, Sussex, where wild garlic proliferates all along the steep, wooded hillsides, wild aromas are ubiquitous and not just attributed to the seasonal plants, but also to fungi. Dryad's saddle is an intriguing mushroom, not only for its monumental size, a contender for the largest capped mushrooms in the UK, reaching up to 60cm in diameter, but also for its novel aroma, likened to the rind of a watermelon. Anticipating an encounter with this formidable bracket fungus, my expectations were met when I caught something large and scaly in the corner of my eye, provoking my attention with its compellingly patterned but moth-eaten coat, worn like a wild feline, though chewed up and spat out, perhaps by other foragers or woodland creatures. 

The saprotrophic mushroom was feasting on a tree snag, the latter's decomposed corpse unidentifiable, at least with my limited arboreal knowledge. This fungus is known to grow on oak trees, one of the most gregarious hosts, with its party guests including lichens, mosses, mushrooms and epiphytic plants, accommodating even and especially in death. Dryad's saddle also has a mythological association with oak, the dryad eponymously pertaining to the tree nymphs of Greek mythology said to dwell within oak trees, and whom perhaps used the mushroom as a stool to perch on. The older species are tough and not worth the harvest - I once learnt this, when overzealously deciding to fry a few of the firmer mushrooms into a kind of souvlaki, which ended up sharing the texture of gristle. But the younger mushrooms are, in my opinion, delectable, soft like a puffball when cooked, but with a more distinct taste, though one that doesn't necessarily elicit consensus amongst foragers.

When cutting through some of the mushroom you can see in the photo above, however, I was met with a bit of a shock when I encountered its guest of honour: maggots, wriggling around in the snug abode of the mushroom's spongey interior. Though I am no entomologist, it is likely that the maggot belonged to the larvae of the fungus gnat Mycetophila cingulum, whose habitat is known to be the titular mushroom itself. Initially disturbed, I then felt disappointment. Disappointment of course hinges upon expectation, as we anticipate a sequence of events to unfold in the way that we have envisioned it to. Why had I expected my engagement with the dryad's saddle to be seamless and predictable? And if I felt regret that such an interaction involved an encounter with maggots that had spoiled the bounty so to speak, wasn't I guilty of expecting this encounter with nature to fit tidily with my own preconception of it, rather than a desire for the natural world on its own terms?

This is the trouble with attempting to embody and enact a philosophy of non-differentiation with 'nature', engaging in acts that immerse in that which we already presume to be a part of. Like the Grizzly Man, the self-fulfilling prophecy of unity-with-nature might well end up being as troublesome as ending up in the stomach of a bear, as seen in Werner Herzog's documentary. Though a rather extreme analogy, I wish to tease out the complex implications and contradictions inherent to reverent accounts of nature engagement, whereby the distinctions between us and the natural world are challenged, notably present in the act of foraging. Such distinctions though are never quite shattered  and this what was intimated to me when I encountered the maggots inside the dryad's saddle. In its putative abjection, the natural world was recalcitrant to the probing hand of the forager.

These ideas made me think of the Estonian born, German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll, an oft cited scientist in the historical works of phenomenology. Notable for his conception of a living being's 'Umwelt', Uexküll gave philosophers especially, the tools with which to articulate the sense of a non-human creature's life-world. In his introduction to Uexküll's A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Dorion Sagan Writes 'Uexküll's example-rich discourse of life perceived by various species is relevant to epistemology; it expands phenomenology; and it integrates the primary data of perceptual experience into behavioral psychology' (Uexküll, p. 4). Expanding upon the phenomenological notion of experience, beyond human terms, Uexküll envisioned the perspectives of non-human beings, no matter how small. As a fellow fan of the foray, Uexküll's detailed fieldwork engenders what Sagan characterises as a 'intrepid philosophical act of observation, intuition, and deduction of the perceptual worlds of other species' (Ibid, p. 20).

I think Uexküll's concept of the Umwelt is helpful for challenging the perhaps problematic expectations that are sedimented into the forager's habits. The more adept the forager becomes, the less they arguably come to naturally appreciate the salient boundaries between themselves and the beings that they intimately engage with. It is these demarcations that Uexküll evinces upon on a stroll he recounts 'on a sunny day, before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, whereby he witnesses a 'bubble' form 'around each of the animals living in the meadow' (Ibid. p. 43). The bubble of each organism is like a semi-porous membrane, though recalcitrant to bursting. Each organism perceives and 'prehends' (to use the Whiteheadian term) its world in a differential and inherently selective way, enclosed in a 'soap bubble' as Uexküll wonderfully phrases it. The Umwelt of a tick, as Uexküll suggests is limited to its particular perceptual faculties, the sense tacitly intimated by the flesh of a mammal which they glean through the odor of butyric acid. A dragonfly, as Uexküll says, is drawn to a particular branch due to the 'sitting tone' it evokes, meaning that such an object is not random, but meaningful and conducive as that branch to the insect.

The fungus gnat also possesses an Umwelt, of which is inextricable to its dwelling in the shape of the dryad's saddle mushroom. How they end up in the mushroom in their larval form is dependent on their progenitor laying her eggs in a tender fungus, which is just young enough for the larvae to embed itself and develop, in turn metabolising on the mushroom, consuming it from the inside out. In its maturer form, like the housefly Uexküll describes, perhaps the gnat 'does not have, by that right, a territory', but as a maggot burrowing into a fungus, it is akin to the spider 'who builds a nest in which it is permanently active has a home which is also its territory' (Ibid, 103). In spite of its parasitical entry into the mushroom, the larvae of the fungus gnat make themselves at home. As Sagan contends, 'Animals who identify the particularly colored, scented flowers, fruit, or fungi upon which they need to feed breed and succeed relative to those who make mistakes in identifying food sources', suggesting that the fungus gnat's astute recognition of the dryad's saddle qua dwelling, is conducive to its offspring's survival (Ibid. 25).

Uexküll’s ideas challenge us to think about ‘nature’ differently, the sharedness that the term implies. As he contends, ‘We comfort ourselves all too easily with the illusion that the relations of another kind of subject to the things of its environment play out in the same space and time as the relations that link us to the things of our human environment. This illusion is fed by the belief in the existence of one and only one world, in which all living beings are encased.' (Ibid, 54). With spaces in between beings, we are hardly talking about solipsism. But Uexküll does encourage us to question how we conceive nature and does intimate that a more holistic conception could be at risk of glossing over what is special about each species and its peculiar life-world. In the context of nature engagement, we might want to reflect critically on our approach to practices like foraging, which we may tacitly conceive as an intimate and wholesome relationship with the natural world. Some trepidation is in fact warranted, not only because of the potential danger associated with misidentifying a toxic species, but also as it can engender a greater awareness of boundaries extant in nature, boundaries that can be respected rather than lamented, even if the mushroom we were hoping to have for tea is already occupied by insects. The implications of these ideas pertain to the fruits of challenging the proclivity for disappointment when encountering unpredictable pairs within the natural world, whereby those species we consider lowly are respected for their auspicious manners of dwelling.

There is an extraordinary but brief passage in Uexküll’s monograph I'd like to end with. As he writes:

"On the grounds of my cousin's estate in Estonia, there stood an old apple tree. A large bracket fungus, which bore a distant resemblance to the face of a clown, was growing on the tree, but no one had noticed it yet. One day, my brother sent for a dozen Russian seasonal workers, who discovered the apple tree and stood before it daily for devotions, murmuring prayer and crossing themselves. They explained that the fungus must be an image with miraculous powers, since it was not made by human hands. Magical processes in nature seemed to them a self-evident fact." (Ibid, 128)

Urging us to cultivate an awareness of the magical nature of natural movement enacted by all kinds of living beings, in the above passage Uexküll evinces the peculiar wonder elicited by the bracket fungus. Not harnessed by human powers, but through the vital powers of its spores, in combination with the guidance of the wind, absorbed by the organic dwelling of the apple tree. Perhaps the bracket fungus, like the dryad’s saddle we spoke of, will soon manifest into a dwelling for the fungus gnat. Like the seasonal workers that Uexküll describes, perhaps we foragers can learn at least sometimes to revere fungi and its party guests from a distance.

Reference

J. Von. Uexküll. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning. University of Minesota Press. Posthumanities series. Tr. J. O'Neill. 2010.