Upwood, Cambridgeshire: This woodland is a stronghold for elm trees – and that brings the prospect of finding a stunning rarity, the wrinkled peach
Above me, a lively breeze moves through the tall elms, branches creaking between gusts. Most of the crowns look healthy, but a few stand skeletal against the sky, suggesting Dutch elm disease. Below them, the woodland floor is scattered with fallen trunks. I find pale bonnet fungi rising from the mossy bark and the frilled fans of tripe fungus. Where older logs have shed their bark, the exposed wood is marked by elm bark beetle etchings (or “galleries”) and the emergence holes of deadwood beetles.
Raveley Wood is one of a chain of small, elm-rich woods along the Cambridgeshire fen edge. I’m here searching for wrinkled peach, a contender for Britain’s most beautiful mushroom: it has a salmon-pink cap, delicately wrinkled, and gills of the same shade. Ruddy-orange, jewel-like droplets often gather on its stem, a process known as guttation.