I got home last week from the 14th International Fungi & Fibre Symposium in Gysinge, Sweden. The setting couldn’t have been better: a self-contained educational centre on the site of a 19th-century ironworks.

Two traditional wood-fired dyepots were kept going for the entire week, as well as a whole bank of dyepots on hotplates. Here’s just a sample of the mushroom colours that came out of the pots. At the close of the event, we all collected samples of all of the week’s colours, a veritable rainbow.

The Scandinavian forests must be full of all the good little dermocybes that give such rich reds and oranges, as we saw these colours in abundance, not to mention the blues from Sarcodon squamosus and the purples that come from Hapalopilus rutilans – I despair of ever finding these here on the West Coast, so I’m doubly grateful for those samples.