THE MAIL ON SUNDAY, September 6th 2020

Entangled Life

Biologist Merlin Sheldrake has long been fascinated by fungi, and their power to transform, whether through decay, fermentation, intoxication or growth

By Sarah Ditum

FIVE STARS

Mushrooms – the magic kind – are known to alter perception. After this book, nothing will seem the same again, particularly not the shrink-wrapped punnet of portobellos in your weekly shop. 

Biologist Merlin Sheldrake has long been fascinated by fungi, and their power to transform, whether through decay, fermentation (yeast is a kind of microscopic fungus), intoxication or growth. 

‘A solid log becomes soil, a lump of dough rises into bread, a mushroom erupts overnight – but how?’

This beautifully written and illustrated book answers those questions, and leaves even more dazzling puzzles and possibilities in their place.

The role of fungi in nature is only beginning to be truly understood. For a long time they were classified as plants, yet they are their own distinct type. Or perhaps distinct is the wrong word: fungi, with their talent for entering symbiotic relationships with other living things, dissolve categories in the same way rot can eat timber.

Take lichen – the flaky, scaly, papery stuff that grows on walls and trees in shades of lurid yellow and pearly blue. This isn’t one organism but a collaboration of two, fungi and algae joining together. 

This theory of lichens was once controversial: Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter, an accomplished naturalist, dismissed it firmly (Sheldrake fills his book with such compelling cameos). 

Now it’s not only accepted, but researchers have found that the closer they look, the more complicated the picture becomes, with ever more participants revealed. ‘Lichen are places where an organism unravels into an ecosystem and an ecosystem congeals into an organism,’ writes Sheldrake.

Forests, we learn, are underpinned by a so-called ‘wood wide web’ of fungi, which share nutrients with trees, and even spread ‘messages’ about parasites and sickness between plants.

Human society too is entwined with fungi. We gain food and medicine from them, but we may owe an even greater debt in future, suggests Sheldrake: fungi’s extraordinary resilience and adaptability offer potential solutions to many environmental threats, from soil exhaustion to dangerous pollutants. 

Sheldrake urges us to see life from the fungal perspective and reveals a world that’s both more extraordinary and more delicate than could be imagined.