The Enid Blyton Society

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=j6a ... om&f=false" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Who would have thought the Faraway Tree books I read over and over again as a child would some day come alive for me in a most unexpected yet delightful way...

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I like that name a lot! Enid should have a toadstool named after her!!

Gosh, are they really that rare? We used to go mushrooming when I was little back in Australia and fly agaric seemed to be reasonably common — at least, we usually saw a few. Never thought of calling them after Enid Blyton, but it's a fitting name! (And no, you definitely don't eat them. They cause hallucinations, apparently. )

I'm impressed that the blogger in the second link was finding them "in the Gippsland region" — which is where I come from! — although he could have been a little more specific. Gippsland is almost the whole of south-eastern Victoria, pretty much everything east of Melbourne and south of the Great Dividing Range — a mere 16,045 square miles, going by Wikipedia!! Probably plenty of mushrooms and toadstools (EB Red and otherwise) within that area...

Surprisingly, a 'mushroom' search in the cave yields a very small crop - and yet I suspect they crop up at least visually in many Enid Blyton stories.

Perhaps a search for 'toadstools' would prove more popular...

The toadstool in the photo looks unreal. Is it edible?

Courtenay wrote: (And no, you definitely don't eat them. They cause hallucinations, apparently. )

Which would make the name 'Enid Blyton' even more appropriate...as she used to close her eyes and see a story materialising in her own private cinema screen!!

Just read the last part. Poisonous.

pete9012S wrote:
Surprisingly, a 'mushroom' search in the cave yields a very small crop - and yet I suspect they crop up at least visually in many Enid Blyton stories.

Perhaps a search for 'toadstools' would prove more popular...

Obviously there's not 'mushroom' for them in the Cave, Pete.

There might be mushroom hidden somewhere in The Cave using a different name.

Fungus?

Rob Houghton wrote: Which would make the name 'Enid Blyton' even more appropriate...as she used to close her eyes and see a story materialising in her own private cinema screen!!

It did occur to me that eating fly agarics might cause one to have visions of Noddy and Big-Ears et al — or maybe the Faraway Tree... (No, I'm NOT prepared to try, thanks.)

Rob Houghton wrote:Obviously there's not 'mushroom' for them in the Cave..

Ha ha that was a good one Rob.

I went to school with a lad named Gary Mushrow - the poor boy was renamed Agaricus bisporus...

As the article says, this species of mushroom is featured in "all good children's fairy stories". Remember that before the period called "the Enlightenment", fairy stores were not targeted at children, but at adults. I think the detail of the pixie toadstool was inherited by the children's fairy stories from the adult fairy stories.

Since the association between these toadstools and fairies seems to be so strong and so old, I wonder if in fact visions of fairies in fact came from the hallucinogenic effect of eating these mushrooms.

In old British fairy lore, fairies almost always have red caps, again linking them to these mushrooms.

KEVP wrote:
Since the association between these toadstools and fairies seems to be so strong and so old, I wonder if in fact visions of fairies in fact came from the hallucinogenic effect of eating these mushrooms.

that's a good point - and seems to be backed up by several sayings and expressions, such as 'he's away with the fairies' when someone is daydreaming and seems 'miles away' and perhaps drugged - and of course the hallucinogenic 'magic mushrooms' - why 'magic' unless they were originally linked to the idea of fairies etc?

Yes it was a good point. It minded me of a song about an adult collecting mushrooms:

http://www.celticlyricscorner.net/clannad/gathering.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;