Review: Field Guide to Mushrooms by Gary B Goldman and Marieka Gryzenhout

Just try to tell me that you won’t feel like you’re in a scene from Little Red Riding Hood while you expertly select and pick mushrooms in a forest, wearing a red, hooded jersey. Apart from allowing me to live out fairy tale fantasy, this book made me feel like a qualified mycologist. Filled to the brim with the strangest, most amazing mushrooms you have ever seen, dancing toe to toe with your garden-variety fungi, this book is the ultimate guide for novice and pro alike. With a quick introduction explaining the basics - from cap shapes, colours and habitats, and classifications – we jump to the main event – 200 species of mushrooms, grouped by shape and thus easy to find.  Each entry has a set of photographs which feel like they’ve come from National Geographic, as well as its distribution, habitat, description (including its smell!), edibility, and any other species which look similar (helpful for those instances when you need to decide whether something is poisonous or not; I’m looking at you, false death cap).

Goldman and Gryzenhout have really changed my attitude about mushrooms with this book. The insightful entries are incredibly informative, and the Field Guide to Mushrooms & Other Fungi of South Africa is an excellent companion for a novice botanist of mycologist, such as myself. Comprehensive, beautiful, and interesting, this book has everything you need to begin a lover affair with fungi.

I am so looking forward to more adventures with this book - it has a million and seven (exactly) helpful photos and is super easy to use - my nieces have even mastered it and identified several 'fairy umbrellas' (read: mushrooms) in the garden. Yes; you read that correctly – this book is even child-friendly, it’s so easy to use. This is a fun guide for your fungi.

Field Guide to Mushrooms & Other Fungi of South Africa by Gary B Goldman and Marieka Gryzenhout is published by Struik Nature, an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa.