Fungarium: Welcome to the Museum

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Dozens of claims are made for medicinal mushroom products. The Bristol Fungarium, for example, sells extracts of fungi that it says relieve anxiety, prevent wrinkle formation, stabilise blood pressure and ease hot flushes. From heart health and type 2 diabetes to allergies and cancers, the list of ailments that mushrooms are said to alleviate is long. But are these claims supported by scientific evidence? Or are medicinal mushrooms just the latest fad? Our fungal collections are particularly rich in type specimens: original material that is used to make clear links between the fungus as a living organism and the name applied to it. The Fungarium was founded in 1879 with the donation of Rev Miles J Berkeley’s personal collection of around 30,000 specimens (including 6,000 type specimens). The illustrations are gorgeous, of course, but there isn't even the smallest attempt at least some sense of proportion; plus - even thought this is a completely personal problem, I admit it - I find that this kind of encyclopaedic books work much better with actual photos than with drawings. After all, wouldn't it be much easier to recognize a fungus in real life if you firstly saw it in a photo compared to a drawing, no matter how beautiful and accurate? I understand that recognizing fungi in the wild is not the main aim of the book, but I still feel like I would have learned much more from real life photos.

Los líquenes son posiblemente una de las relaciones más exitosas que existen en la naturaleza y se deben a una asociación entre un hongo y un alga o cianobacteria. De esta relación, el hongo, por decirlo de una manera, se hace del poder de la fotosíntesis y se beneficia de los azúcares producidos en esta relación.

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Fungarium is aimed at adult visitors at Kew and joins the imprint’s “flagship” Welcome to the Museum series, which has sold nearly one million copies worldwide in 28 languages. Fungi underpin all life on earth and yet it’s estimated that over 95% of fungal species remain unknown. A digitised collection can be accessed online for free by researchers from anywhere in the world. It helps make research more efficient by sharing our knowledge with as many people as possible.

Ester Gaya is a senior research leader at Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England. She began her career in mycology in Spain and lived in the US before settling in the UK. She has spent the past twenty years researching fungi and is especially fascinated by lichens and their evolutionary process.

Big Picture Press, an imprint of Templar Publishing, is partnering with the Science Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to publish two new titles in its hugely successful Welcome to the Museum series.

The specimens in our Fungarium can help us to describe unknown species; understand the distribution of fungi and plant-fungus interactions; identify pathogens that could threaten crops; distinguish the spread and effect of invasive species; and analyse the impact of climate change. We can also extract DNA from specimens to find useful traits or to discover new medicines.

Big Picture Press, an imprint of Templar Publishing, is partnering with the Science Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to publish two new titles in its hugely successful Welcome to the Museum series. The first of the two books, Planetarium, in partnership with the Science Museum, is written by UCL Professor of Astrophysics, Raman Prinja and illustrated by The Book of Dust’s Chris Wormell. Set to publish later this year, the book will herald a likely surge in space publishing for the moon-landing anniversary in 2019. Nota Bene: This book is part of the outstanding Welcome to the Museum Series, which are uniformly excellent. There are quite a few, some of which include: Planetarium, Dinosaurium, Botanicum, Historium, and Animalium.Katie Scott graduated from University of Brighton in 2011. Her work draws influences from traditional medical and botanical illustration, both in aesthetic and subject matter. It also plays with the ideas of scientific uncertainty and speculation, fabricating the inner and outer workings of the world. Her illustrations depict a familiar yet fantasy vision of plants, humans, and minerals. Specimens, paper records and objects can degrade over time, or could be lost in a catastrophic event. Imaging them today preserves them in digital form, for much longer than their physical existence. Fungarium, much like the other compendiums from the Welcome To The Museum series, is stunningly illustrated and full of well researched, scintallating facts that will prove fascinating and useful in turn. Learn here about how fungus works, how mushroom is technically not a true scientific term, and about how fungus is one of those kingdoms we know so little on that we have discovered roughly only around 5% of what scientists believe to be the true number of fungus species on planet earth. Tour the galleries and learn why fungi are more related to animals than plants. Discover how they evolved. Find out about their amazing variety of shapes and colors, some of them alien-like, almost monstrous, and disgustingly smelly, others incredibly beautiful.” The second book, Fungarium, in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is written by the Kew mycology team and illustrated by Katie Scott – the artist behind Animalium and Botanicum in the same series. The book is the second title that Big Picture Press has created in partnership with Kew, the first, Botanicum, published in 2o16 and was written by Kew’s Director of Science, Kathy Willis.

Admito que compré este libro por sus hermosas ilustraciones y terminé enamorándome del contenido, aunque en un par de ocasiones lo llegué a sentir demasiado inundado de un vocabulario muy especializado. Resumo brevemente algunas cosas que captaron mi curiosidad: Created in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the captivating and fascinating text is written by Kew mycologists David L. Hawksworth, Laura M. Suz, Pepijn W. Kooij, Kare Liimatainen, Tom Prescott, Lee Davies and Ester Gaya.Speaking of learning, I feel like I learned almost nothing from this book: the text felt sometimes waaay to scientific and technical (especially considering that it's targeted mainly to middle grade readers), and sometimes oversimplified. Overall, it gave off a sense of non-cohesiveness, and the illustrations of something incredibly pretty but also not really useful. Who isn't excited about fungus? Unfortunately too many people, which is why I am so pleased that this book exists. A favourite Christmas present, this has left be with the New Year's resolution of becoming the best amateur mycologist I can be - something I had forgotten mattered to me so much despite a favourite series of unfortunate events book being The Grim Grotto (no spoilers on that one here - that is for another time). Los hongos están de moda, aunque siento que es más por el tema de las drogas y su carácter lúdico, y menos por las razones que me gustarían.