On the Wildside with Keith Broomfield: Fantastic fungi down the haugh at the River Devon

In one small patch of wood, I discovered a clump of small honey waxcaps - little tangerine gems with glistening dew-speckled caps and glowing with such burning intensity that one was quickly drawn deep within their alluring embrace.

Their beauty of form and brightness of colour was beguiling and it felt wonderful to be down at eye level on the woodland floor.

It was like entering a different world, with a rich, heady aroma of leaf mould enveloping my senses, almost as if the very essence of the earth was filling my lungs.

I started to examine the immediate area around me and noticed a strange, wrinkled, greyish nugget poking up through the ground litter.

It was a coral fungus, an unusual and convoluted little mass which I wouldn’t have spotted unless I was down close to the woodland floor.

On a nearby tumbled branch, little yellow cylindrical flecks stood proud, each one no more than 5mm tall.

It was a cluster of small stagshorn fungus, which once again I had only detected because my eyes were at ground level.

Not too far away, a much larger toadstool with a gleaming brown cap shone bright – a birch bolete.

These three finds underlined the immense variety of fungi in our environment, ranging from familiar types such as toadstools to others that are club or bracket shaped, or form encrusting moulds on decaying wood.

Such diversity in shape and form is matched by the dazzling array of colours featured by different species, including every shade of red imaginable, ochres, yellows, and hues of orange.

Earlier that day, I had stumbled upon a group of fly agarics, their white-flecked scarlet caps arranged in a tier on an incline, and which reminded me of a vibrant scene from some fairy tale book.

It was truly magical, and a telling reminder of the important role fungi play in our environment, aiding decomposition processes and recycling nutrients back into the soil.