"It's funny you see in different cultures around the world a tendency to celebrate mushrooms or to fear them," Sheldrake says. "That spills over nearly 10 square kilometres and is somewhere between 2,000–8,000 years old," he says.Īnd there are probably many other larger specimens that remain undescribed, he adds.Īnother fungus he's interested in is mushrooms, and he's not the only one. They can be vast - a honey fungus in Oregon is one of the largest-known organisms in the world. It's a group of fungi that can grow expansively beneath the soil's surface and it's known to kill and devour trees by cutting off the flow of their sap. One fungus he is particularly interested in is the honey fungus. "Unlike plants which make their own food by eating light and carbon dioxide … fungi have to find food in the world ready-made and digest it as we do too," he explains. These eukaryotic organisms, which include mushrooms, yeasts and moulds, fall under their own kingdom, and have more in common with animals, Sheldrake says. Until the 1960s, fungi were classified as plants, but that's no longer the case. Now he's written a book on fungi called Entangled Life, which looks at how the micro-organisms could help everyone understand our planet better. "But we took many of them, then pressed them and made a cider, which was delicious to my surprise, " he told ABC RN's Life Matters. No one was going to eat the apples," Sheldrake says, of the legendary scientist's reportedly dour personality. "Some likened the flavour to Newton's character in his later life. When he was studying at Cambridge University, he went scrumping and stole apples, said to be the same variety that inspired Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravity, from the botanic gardens to make natural yeast-fermented cider. His love for fermenting went well beyond those four walls. Merlin Sheldrake says that without fungi, there would be no land plants.
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