I have some interesting mushrooms at the front of the driveway. This has been a pretty soggy August (over seven inches of rain so far), and that has inspired some mushrooms to sprout. It usually happens sometime during the summer in this general location.
The orange ones are pretty colorful.
Like most mushrooms, they don't last long, just a few days before the color fades and they release their spores. The orange ones have been expanding in recent years. There used to be just one spot where they popped up; now they are in a few places. The front of the driveway is dirt, gravel, and clay, but there's a lot of pine straw, as you can see; there are several very large old pine trees there that shed liberally. It is pretty shaded for all but a couple of hours each day, so if any area is damp, that one will be.
They first emerge looking like this:
But then soon expand. The next day, the above mushrooms looked like this.
When a rain hits, they start to dissolve away.
The above pictures are from the original area where they appeared.
I also have some puffballs:
And these look different...though I don't know enough about mushrooms to say:
Up closer to the house, there's this specimen:
It looks a mushroom that has mold growing on it--but all of the examples look the same, so maybe it's what this particular type looks like normally. There is a brain mushroom, aka false morel; this isn't that. That being said, it looks like a brain to me. It's a little longer-lasting than the red ones above.
I have zero interest in trying to determine if these are edible. For example, the orange ones might be Russula emetica, a species that likes to hang out with pine trees, or it might not--Wikipedia notes there are "over 100 red-capped Russula species worldwide." Wiki further notes that R. emetica is toxic; it can be made edible through pickling or boiling, but consumption isn't recommended. No worries here. Wild mushrooms are not an area I ever plan to explore. But they're interesting nonetheless.
