An Illustrated Guide to Fungi on Wood in New Zealand

Forest and Bird, Issue 266, 1 November 1992, Page 36

An Illustrated Guide to Fungi on Wood in New Zealand

Mark Bellingham

I.A. Hood (Auckland University Press) $39.95 Fungi are an essential part of the recycling processes that occur within forests, breaking down the wood of living and dead trees, releasing the bonded carbon and chemical energy for their own use and leaving the residues to decompose into the soil and sustain the living forest. Most of our native wood fungi are also found in Australia, Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific, and a few also in South America. Some native fungi attack exotic trees, but are not found in the northern hemisphere where these trees originate. Naturally some exotic wood fungi have arrived in New Zealand with exotic trees and timber. of

This book is an introduction to tree and wood fungi, for those of us who have progressed beyond Marie Taylor’s Mobil Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools. To use the book you will need to master the key, but don’t despair, the text is wellillustrated (170 line drawings and 48 colour illustrations) featuring the more common species and noting their hosts. Perhaps some more diagrams

might have helped in the key, for those who are totally fungiignorant. At 400 pages this book is good value.