An impressive (and enormous) new field guide to mushrooms, toadstools, gasteromycetes and brackets. If you carry Stace’s New Flora with you in the field during the summer for plants, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to carry this guide, which is smaller and slightly lighter, during the autumn! The rest of us will leave it in the car.

The range of agariciform and bracket species illustrated is unrivalled in a modern English work. The illustrations are excellent and recall those of Lange’s 5-volume Flora Agaricina Danica, published 80 years ago. My only criticism is that there is generally only one fruitbody shown and that is in perfect condition, fully imbibed with water; useful characters like hygrophany and fading are not shown, nor different colour forms (eg. Russula) or the confusing colour changes on drying.

The brackets, gasteromycetes and larger jelly fungi are well covered, including less well-known (but not necessarily rare) species like Tremella aurantia.

The guide also covers resupinates ("white-wash" or "paint" fungi) but without illustration of microscopic features (not even those visible with a x20 hand lens) this will be little use for identification unless you are prepared to wade through all the descriptions, and anyway too few species are covered. Finally, there are the usual few plates of larger ascomycetes, but again only few species are shown.

The concept of a field guide to fungi is an oxymoron, and, as always, field identifications of species you are unfamiliar with should be confirmed under the microscope.