A History of Mycology in the UK

The history of mycology in the UK is a story about curiosity refusing to be respectable. It’s about amateurs who became authorities. It’s about a discipline that spent centuries being dismissed as the ugly stepsister of botany, slowly asserting itself until — right now, in the 2020s — it sits at the centre of some of the most urgent ecological conversations happening in British science.

Understanding where all this came from isn’t just interesting history. It explains why our data is patchy, why certain species seem to vanish from the record for decades at a time, and why what you record today matters more than it ever has.

Let’s start at the beginning. Or rather, let’s start with a man in Yorkshire who couldn’t stop drawing mushrooms.

Early British Naturalists and the Fungi They Found

The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw Britain in the grip of natural history fever. Botany was respectable, even fashionable. Zoology was coming into its own. But fungi? They were awkward. They didn’t flower. They appeared mysteriously and rotted away. They didn’t fit neatly into the binomial systems being built to make sense of living things. For most observers, they were a curiosity at best and a nuisance at worst.

Some naturalists couldn’t help themselves, though.

William Hudson (1730–1793) was a London apothecary who produced Flora Anglica in 1762, the first British flora to properly adopt Linnaean nomenclature. He included fungi, somewhat reluctantly, but the effort mattered. It established that British naturalists were at least paying attention.

But the figure who really changed things was James Bolton (c. 1750–1799). Bolton was a weaver-turned-naturalist from Warley, near Halifax, and he is, to put it plainly, one of the most underrated figures in British natural history. Self-taught, working-class by the standards of his era, and possessed of a draughtsman’s eye that was almost unfairly good, Bolton produced An History of Fungusses About Halifax between 1788 and 1791. Four volumes. Hand-coloured engravings of exceptional quality. Species described with genuine precision.

Interestingly, Bolton wasn’t working in a university. He had no institutional support. He was recording the fungi of a single West Yorkshire valley — the kind of hyper-local, granular recording that modern citizen scientists do today — and he was doing it because he found them astonishing. His illustrations are so accurate that species can still be reliably identified from them more than two centuries later, leaving behind a remarkable legacy.

Bolton’s work didn’t exactly transform British mycology overnight. It was admired, but the field remained fragmented. The problem was one of communication. Talented naturalists were scattered across the country, each building their own knowledge in relative isolation. There was no mechanism for pooling what they were finding.

That began to change in the Victorian era, when the combination of railways, cheap printing, and a bourgeois obsession with collecting and classifying the natural world created conditions in which a discipline like mycology could start to cohere.

The Victorian Craze and the Man Who Drew Everything

Victorian Britain was mad for natural history. Fern collecting. Bird’s egg collecting. Butterfly pinning. Wildflower pressing. The middle classes poured into the countryside and brought back specimens, and the publishing industry grew fat on field guides and illustrated monographs. Mycology benefited enormously from this moment, and one figure dominated it so thoroughly that his name is still inescapable in the literature.

Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1825–1914) — M.C. Cooke, as he signed almost everything — was extraordinary. A schoolteacher who taught himself natural history, he eventually landed at Kew as a government botanist and produced a body of work on fungi that is, frankly, staggering in its scope. His British Fungi appeared in 1871. His Illustrations of British Fungi (Hymenomycetes) ran to eight volumes between 1881 and 1891, containing over a thousand colour plates. He wrote popular guides designed for ordinary readers. He corresponded with naturalists all over the world.

Cooke was a populariser as much as a scientist, and that mattered. He understood that mycology could not survive as the private enthusiasm of a handful of specialists. It needed an audience. He wrote accessible prose, encouraged amateurs, and created the sense that this was a discipline open to anyone willing to put in the work.

He wasn’t alone. Worthington G. Smith (1835–1917) made significant contributions to the study of plant-pathogenic fungi and contributed extensively to Gardeners’ Chronicle and other publications, reaching a readership well beyond specialist circles. W.B. Grove (1848–1938) was patient, meticulous, worked well into his eighties and produced definitive work on microfungi, the moulds and rusts and smuts that most naturalists walked straight past. Grove’s work on the Sphaeropsidales and Melanconiales remained authoritative for decades. These men were building the foundations that a proper scientific society would need.

It’s worth pausing here to acknowledge what we’re actually describing. The Victorian mycological world was almost entirely male. It was predominantly middle-class. It was heavily concentrated in England, with Scotland and Wales significantly underrepresented in the record. The species being described in most detail were the large, attractive, easily noticed fungi: the agarics, the boletes, the bracket fungi. The microfungi, the less charismatic species, the habitats further from railway lines and country estates were all poorly documented, if at all.

That’s not a criticism of individuals. It’s a structural observation. The shape of early mycology reflected who had access to leisure time, education, and transport. And those gaps in coverage echo through the data we have today. When we find species “missing” from certain regions of the UK, we have to ask: were they always rare there, or did no one who knew how to record them ever visit?

A Society Is Founded in Selby

By the 1890s, there were enough dedicated British mycologists scattered around the country to sustain something more formal than a network of correspondents. In September 1896, a group of enthusiasts gathered in the unremarkable North Yorkshire market town of Selby and founded the British Mycological Society.

It was a modest beginning. The founding membership was small, the Society’s resources were minimal, and the programme was built around what amateurs had always done best: going out and looking for fungi together. The annual forays — field meetings where members gathered at a location, spent several days recording everything they could find, then brought specimens back for identification and discussion — became the defining institution of British mycology for the next century and more.

The BMS forays were about more than data. They were community. They were the mechanism by which expertise passed between generations, where a junior member learned at the elbow of someone who had been doing this for thirty years, where species that stumped one observer got passed around a room full of others until someone recognised them. This is peer learning in its purest form, and it worked.

The Society began publishing its Transactions, which gave British mycologists a venue to share findings, describe new species, and argue about taxonomy. This was important. Previously, work had been scattered across horticultural journals, general natural history publications, and privately circulated papers. The Transactions created an imperfect, incomplete, but real record of what was being found in Britain.

Elsie Maud Wakefield (1886–1972) represents something important in this period. A Kew mycologist who worked on rusts and other pathogens, Wakefield was one of the relatively few women who made it into the professional layer of British mycology during the early twentieth century, and she worked actively to bridge the worlds of professional science and amateur enthusiasm. She contributed to public-facing guides, worked with the BMS, and helped sustain the sense that the Society’s value lay in bringing both kinds of knowledge together.

But here’s the honest version of what the BMS was in its early decades: it was a society of dedicated enthusiasts, most of them doing this in their spare time, with limited resources and no systematic plan for national coverage. The forays went where members wanted to go and where hosts could be found. Some areas got visited repeatedly. Others were never covered at all. The resulting dataset had significant gaps — not because people weren’t trying, but because the scale of Britain’s fungal diversity was simply beyond what a small voluntary organisation could cover.

Twentieth Century Science Catches Up

The mid-twentieth century brought mycology into closer contact with academic science. Universities began taking fungal biology more seriously, partly because of the economic importance of plant pathogens, partly because of growing ecological interest in decomposition and soil health, and partly because a handful of very determined scientists simply refused to let the field be ignored.

Roy Watling (1938–2020) was one of the most significant British mycologists of the late twentieth century. Based at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Watling worked on Scottish fungi with a thoroughness that transformed the national understanding of what was growing north of the border. He contributed to countless identification guides, described new species, trained a generation of Scottish mycologists, and wrote accessibly enough that his work reached well beyond academic circles. His death in 2020 was a genuine loss to British mycology.

But perhaps the most significant shift of the late twentieth century wasn’t a single figure or publication. It was a change in how mycology understood its own purpose.

Through most of its history, the discipline had been primarily taxonomic, concerned with identifying, naming, and describing species. What was it? Where did it fit in the classification? Those were the driving questions. What began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s was a different set of questions: Is it declining? Is its habitat under threat? What does its presence or absence tell us about ecosystem health?

This was the era of the Red Data Lists. Across Europe, conservationists began compiling assessments of species thought to be threatened or vulnerable. Fungi were included belatedly, imperfectly, but they were included. In Britain, this meant trying to establish baselines for species that had been recorded sporadically, in variable ways, across more than a century of data.

It was harder than it sounds. A species recorded from a site in 1920 and not recorded again might be extinct, or might simply never have been looked for again. The data wasn’t good enough to tell you which. And the problem of distinguishing genuine decline from recording effort variation remains one of the central challenges in fungal conservation to this day.

What the Red Data List process did do was force mycologists to confront how little they actually knew. That discomfort was productive. It drove a new generation of more systematic recording efforts and helped make the case that data collection needed to be more coordinated, more consistent, and eventually. more digital.

The Digital Revolution: FRDBI, the NBN Atlas, and Recording at Scale

The launch of the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) in 2000, and with it the NBN Atlas, changed everything about how biological records were managed in Britain. For the first time, there was a national infrastructure for pooling biodiversity data — a place where records from hundreds of different recording schemes could be aggregated, made searchable, and made publicly available.

For mycology, the pivotal institution in this shift was the Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland, the FRDBI. Built to hold the accumulated weight of British and Irish fungal recording, the FRDBI has grown to hold over 2.5 million records, spanning observations from Victorian naturalists’ notebooks all the way to recent field surveys. That’s an extraordinary archive, decades of dedicated amateur and professional effort, painstakingly digitised and brought into a single system. The transfer of this dataset to the NBN Atlas was a landmark moment: for the first time, those millions of records became publicly searchable, mappable, and available to researchers, conservationists, and recorders across the country.

You can go to the NBN Atlas now and pull up distribution maps for thousands of British fungal species, maps built from that century-spanning dataset. Those maps are extraordinary. They’re also, if you know how to read them, somewhat alarming. Look at the coverage for almost any species and you’ll see the same pattern: dense clusters around cities, around popular nature reserves, around places the BMS has held forays. And then, filling most of the map, a whole lot of nothing. Not because the fungi aren’t there. Because no one who knows how to record them has visited, or if they have, the records haven’t made it into the system.

The NBN Atlas era also coincided with the rise of citizen science platforms. iRecord, managed by the Biological Records Centre, gives amateur naturalists a structured way to submit verified records that flow directly into national datasets. iNaturalist, with its AI-assisted identification and global community lowered the barrier to entry even further, bringing in observers who might never have thought of themselves as scientists.

And then there’s Field Mycologist. Built specifically for UK fungi recording, it’s the only dedicated platform designed from the ground up around the needs of the British mycological community, structured to capture the habitat detail, the seasonal context, and the verification workflow that turns a photograph into a scientifically useful record. Where iRecord and iNaturalist serve all taxa and all countries, Field Mycologist does one thing: it makes it as easy as possible to record fungi in Britain and get those records into the national picture. That specificity matters. Fungi have particular recording requirements, spore prints, substrate notes, associated tree species that a general-purpose platform often doesn’t prompt you to capture. A purpose-built tool does.

Taken together, these platforms represent something that would have been unimaginable to the BMS’s Victorian founders: a national recording infrastructure capable of handling contributions from thousands of observers simultaneously, routing them through expert verification, and making them available to science within hours of submission. The potential is enormous. And it revealed, more starkly than ever, the scale of what we don’t yet know.

What We’ve Been Missing

Kew’s Lost and Found Fungi project, launched in 2014, set out to address one specific part of the problem: priority grassland fungi — species associated with ancient, unimproved grasslands that have declined catastrophically as agricultural intensification has reshaped the British landscape.

The results were striking. Systematic survey of sites that had received little attention over the preceding decades turned up more than 300 new county records for species including the Pink Waxcap (Porpolomopsis calyptriformis) and other waxcap grassland specialists. These weren’t new species, they were known species whose actual distribution was simply much poorly documented than anyone had realised.

Think about what that means. Species that conservationists had been treating as scarce were, in some cases, less scarce than the data suggested, because the data was a product of where people had looked, not a true picture of where the species occurred. That’s a significant finding. It changes how we prioritise sites, how we make conservation decisions, how we argue for funding.

But it also cuts the other way. Some species that had been recorded from sites in the mid-twentieth century genuinely haven’t been found again. Whether that’s because they’re gone, because conditions have changed, or because nobody’s looked hard enough, in many cases, we still don’t know.

Here’s the thing: that uncertainty is not a permanent condition. It’s a data problem. And data problems, given enough people with enough time and the right tools, are solvable.

Where We Are Today and What’s Still Missing

Walk into any BMS foray today and you’ll find something that would have surprised the Society’s Victorian founders: smartphones everywhere. People photographing everything and uploading it to apps before they’ve even left the site. The technology has genuinely democratised identification in ways that weren’t conceivable twenty years ago.

AI-assisted identification has improved rapidly. It’s not a replacement for expertise at the moment but it’s an extraordinary first filter. A confident iNaturalist suggestion from an algorithm, confirmed by a specialist observer, is a legitimate contribution to the national dataset. That matters. It means that someone who has been interested in fungi for six months, who doesn’t yet know their Mycena from their Marasmius, can still make a meaningful record if they photograph carefully and engage with the verification system.

The BMS itself has evolved. It publishes Field Mycology, runs educational events, maintains recording schemes, and actively tries to engage a younger and more diverse membership than the Society has historically attracted. That effort matters, because the demographic skew of earlier mycology — older, male, southern English — still shapes the gaps in our knowledge.

But we should be honest about what’s still missing. Seasonal variation is one of the great under-appreciated challenges. Fungi fruit when conditions suit them — temperature, moisture, the specific relationships between fungal networks and their host trees or soil organisms. A site visited once in October might yield an impressive list and still miss species that fruit in June, or December, or only in years of exceptional rainfall. Multi-year, multi-season data from the same sites is extraordinarily valuable and extraordinarily rare.

Geographic coverage remains wildly uneven. Large parts of Wales, the north of England, and Scotland are genuinely under-recorded. Not slightly under-recorded. Systematically, persistently under-recorded, in ways that mean we cannot say with confidence whether species are rare there or simply unobserved.

The problem that the Red Data Lists confronted in the 1990s hasn’t gone away. We’re trying to assess whether species are declining or recovering against a historical record that was itself produced by incomplete, biased, geographically uneven effort. It’s like trying to judge whether a river is rising or falling using a ruler that was bent when you bought it.

Why You Are Part of This Story

We are, right now, at a genuinely pivotal moment in British mycology. The tools exist. The infrastructure exists. The scientific understanding of why this matters: for woodland health, for grassland conservation, for understanding how ecosystems respond to climate change, has never been more sophisticated or more urgent.

What has always been the limiting factor is people. People willing to go out consistently, to record carefully, to submit their data to platforms where it can do scientific work, to come back to the same sites across multiple seasons and multiple years.

James Bolton, drawing mushrooms in a Halifax valley in 1788, didn’t have access to any of the tools you have now. He had no community to share his finds with, no digital infrastructure to make his records useful beyond his immediate circle. And yet his work is still being cited. Still being used. Because he was there, and he paid attention, and he wrote it down.

You can do the same thing with the difference that your records can flow, within hours of submission, into a national dataset that researchers and conservationists are using right now. The Pink Waxcap in your nearest unimproved meadow. The Porcelain Fungus on that dying beech you walk past on your way to the shop. The cluster of waxcaps on an old churchyard that nobody seems to have noticed. These are all pieces of a puzzle that British science is still trying to solve.

From Bolton’s painstaking engravings to Cooke’s eight-volume illustration project, from the first BMS foray in Selby to the NBN Atlas aggregating millions of records from hundreds of schemes, the history of British mycology is a story of people refusing to let these organisms be invisible. Refusing to accept that they were too difficult, too fleeting, too lowly to deserve documentation.

That refusal is what produced the knowledge we have. And the knowledge we’ll have in another fifty years, the knowledge that future conservationists will use to make decisions about what to protect, what to restore, what has been lost. That knowledge is being built right now. By the records being submitted today. By the sites being visited this weekend.

You’re not just a hobbyist. You’re part of a tradition that stretches back centuries, and a data-collection effort that has never mattered more. Get out there. Take good photographs. Record the habitat. Submit the data. And keep going back to the same sites because the pattern across years tells a story that a single visit never can.

Start Recording

Field Mycologist is a recording platform built for exactly this purpose. Designed to make the process of submitting and verifying fungal observations as simple and as useful as possible, with data flowing directly to the scientific record. Create an account, join the community, and start adding your observations to the national picture. Your records matter. This is how the gaps get filled.