On 2009-07-24 13:21:37 +0100, Sacha said:

On 2009-07-24 11:57:05 +0100, Martin said:
snip

Just think of what happened to Nicholas Evans & Family and they were
expert fungi pickers!

What did happen to Nicholas Evans and Family, Sacha? I've never heard of them.

Author of The Horse Whisperer, lives in a village near here. Up in
Scotland (IIRC) he and his family gathered mushrooms and ended up on
dialysis and lucky to be alive. I have no idea where or how they are
now. But gathering mushrooms was a regular thing with all of them and
they were said to be 'experts'.

Sorry to answer my own post but coincidentally there's a very nice
letter from Nicholas Evans in our Parish Magazine this month. He's
thanking people for their kind wishes and prayers. He says that it's
almost a year since they were poisoned and that the first 6 or 7 months
were awful. Since the spring they've started to improve but still have
to do a lot of dialysis and are on the waiting list for kidney
transplants. This was a horrible and shocking thing to happen to them
but please, mushroom pickers, be very, very careful. A newspaper
article written at the time says that they ate Cortinarius
speciosissimus which a spokesman for the Association of British Fungus
Groups said they might have mistaken for chanterelles which can grow in
similar locations and can look very similar. The species Cortinarius
is extremely toxic and has caused 'a smattering of cases across Europe
where it was lethal. The liver is broken down into a pulp'.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.com
Shrubs & perennials. Tender & exotics.
South Devon