fig. 1
The head should glow sulphur, not flatten to lemon.
A living Physarum sporangium catches the morning at a granular angle; a flat, even yellow means the colony has already begun to sporulate, and the watercolour will read dead.
Notes for the field, taken at first light on a damp oak log near Lyme Regis — when the slime is still glowing and the day has not yet bleached it.
A living Physarum sporangium catches the morning at a granular angle; a flat, even yellow means the colony has already begun to sporulate, and the watercolour will read dead.
A reticulum that only forks outward is a dying one; the trained eye looks for return-loops — places where two strands rejoin — and counts at least three within a coin's width.
If the slender column under the head reads dry, dusty, or pale, the specimen is past use; aging-brown stipes, slick with the substrate's damp, hold the head upright through the painter's afternoon.
A single sporangium tells a label; a sequence — fresh sulphur, mature gold, weathered grey — tells a life, and that is what the monograph is finally for.