A love affair with giant polypores

Abstract

For almost eighty years, I have had an intermittent interest in Ganoderma adspersum and Fomes fomentarius, both of which form large woody basidiomes on the trunks of beech trees. The first encounter with Ganoderma was in Clandeboye Domain near Bangor in Northern Ireland when, after a titanic struggle, a huge specimen was detached from a beech tree and borne in triumph to the Botany Department near the start of my undergraduate life in 1922 at Queen's University, Belfast. A couple of years later I read the first two volumes of Buller's ‘Researches on Fungi’ and was excited by his perceptive analysis of Ganoderma in relation to spore liberation (Buller, 1922).