Elf Cup Viewing Time

The Japanese make a huge fuss of their cherry blossom viewing time - due to start, this year, around 21st March - and we have begun to catch up by creating demand for snowdrop viewing, but the Memory Wanderer household has a far more difficult phenomenon to capture, the year's first 'blooming' of scarlet elf cup fungi.

They tend to be found in damp leaf litter beneath well-established beech trees, often close to where snowdrops are flowering. As of last year we'd found five elf cup sites in Dunrobin Castle woods so, with the first ones due to appear about now, we set off this morning to see if we could find any.

The first site, near the castle car park, was empty, and the second (above) produced....

....just one - it's to the right of centre in this picture.

And that's one of the problems with scarlet elf cups: they don't come out in excessive numbers, like cherry blossom. If you want to see them....

....you really have to get your nose down into the leaf litter.

The third site we visited was the main one which, last year, boasted masses of elf cups in a fairly limited area, so was very impressive. It's deep in the castle woodland and today....

....produced just six 'blooms'. There were probably more but they're often quite small - this one was about 20mm across - they're....

....deeply buried in moss and leaves and, despite their startling colour, quite difficult to spot in amongst leaves which are a rich copper-brown.

But they're worth the effort, not least because of their startling colour. Of course, scarcity makes them even more desirable, like diamonds. Perhaps the Japanese should think about that.