Champignon roulette

I've just spent a week in Brittany, assessing the kind of gardening effort required when you leave a property alone for three months starting in the middle of July.

Our cottage near Loudeac is quite used to neglect on a regular basis. We've had it for 25 years and in a drawer at home I have a series of photos of me in the garden, holding the camera at arm's length, photographing myself surrounded by huge thistles, giant docks and towering cow parsley that comes up to my shoulder.

On the lawn.

The worst occasion was one year when I failed to get to the house until the middle of May. Things grow prolifically in Brittany with its alternating sun and rain and it's crucial to get one cut in before Easter. And I hadn't. As I found out, if you don't get that early cut, then your best bet is to swap the mower for a quick application of napalm.

The weeds were so tall and so embedded that I had to buy a scythe to get the foliage short enough to even tempt the mower at a first pass. Forget the glistening torso of Aidan Turner in Poldark scything away with rhythm and style watched by admiring maidens from the village. This was me in a baseball cap, grunting and swearing away as the blade snagged and buckled against the woody ecosystem that had rapidly estalished itself in my absence.

I used to worry about moles ruining the lawn, but pretty soon the grass got so out of hand that I could never set the cutting height low enough (Breton moles, don't leave mounds, it's more spread out, like a crepe de terre) for them to be any trouble. Now we live in peace and I view the two colonies' progress round the grass that I mow with benign Chris Packham-esque interest.

In 2015 I'd already managed three cuts by July and so when I returned last week, things weren't too bad. I still couldn't put the grass box on the back and the mower blasted cut grass out at the jammed-open-rear-flap like it was green spray-on cement. But it's a look I've learned to live with. Every lawn-cutting day is St. Patrick’s day.

The bonus on this trip over was that down in the copse, I found some intriguing champignons dotted across the compost heap. The mushrooms I find in the garden at home look treacherous and threatening and I wouldn't touch them with an extended tree pruner. But these looked virtually the same kind of fare you'd get shoved in a black plastic tub and retailed at Waitrose.

The big question still lingered, though. Were they poisonous? It was tempting to stick them straight in a frying pan…

I rounded up the most perfect examples and stuck them in a bin-liner and took them home to Blighty. I thought it was probably safer to let the internet work out if they were edible or not, as opposed to the simple ‘nah, they look all right’.

I looked up poisonous mushrooms and they all seem to have ferocious names – the names that fantasy warriors give their swords – things like skull-biter, destroying angel, deadly webcap, fool’s funeral.

I found my champignons pretty quickly. I'd picked a great big bag full of the Death cap mushroom. They were supposedly the mushrooms that finished off the emperor Claudius in 54AD and in 2013 a woman was killed by simply adding some to soup she was making. I had enough to kill, well, at least everyone in my postcode.

Which is one the reasons I don’t gamble…