FAIRY RINGS

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 24 August 1935, Page 10

FAIRY RINGS

THE REAL EXPLANATION In England a century or more ago the people believed in fairies and goblins, evil spirits and witches, and so superstitious were they that they often imagined they saw these little folk, who came to play an important part in their daily lives. Because ■ they could not understand natural things about them, they put them down to the doings of fairies and witches. It is not surprising, therefore, that they believed the familiar fairy rings were planted by.fairies who danced in the circle on moonlight nights. To-day we know r better, for science has taught us that the fairy rings h re made up of numbers of toadstools of a species called the champignon, growing, not in groups like other I fungi, but in circles. The ring originates from a single fungus, which takes so much nourishment from the ground immediately round it as to make the soil unsuitable 'for further < production of fungi. The spawn, however, spreads all round, and in the second 1 year a crop of champignons is produced in a circle. Again the same thing happens, and so the circle is an ever- [ widening one.

The fairy ring fungi usually found in New Zealand is possibly an introduced species. Did you know that we have several thousand species of fungi in 2sew Zealand alone? There is every size, colour, shape and hue; every grade of hardness, softness, toughness, brittleness and beauty. In the bush you will coine across perhaps a scarlet one, shaped like a flower, a black one, or one as bright a blue as the sky on a summer’s day. But best of all the fungi family we know the mushroom and the beloved little toadstools of the fairy rings.

We have not the supex-stition. and fear of our forefathers of that which we cannot understand, but we like to keep alive the memory of this one belief of theirs—that fairies dance in the moonlight in the fairy rings.