What once used to be a quiet road is now a heavily used, almost-highway for many motorists travelling in the eastern part of Singapore. For me, it has been almost a daily affair to use this road to drive darling dearest to and from work during the holiday season.The current monsoon season here is changing the landscape of this avenue – at least to the fascinated pair of eyes here. Mushrooms ballooning out of the ever-green, green grass lining the roads like there’s going to be a great gathering of the fungal kind. It is awesome. To the pseudo-biologist here, she has a lot of problems keeping her eyes on the traffic in front of her steering wheel. Glancing sideways and heart melting away by those alluring little ones, she decided that she must park the car by a side lane and grab darling dearest’s latest compact digital camera to explore the long stretch of cuties before their glory days are over and done with.
Bracing fast-moving vehicles zooming to and fro the avenue, I stared, squatted and snapped numerous shots of various mushrooms sprouting along the road divider. Motorists who spotted me must have thought me as some crazy woman who has nothing better to do on a monday morning peak hour. To me, it was great fun, an adventure amidst the hustle-bustle of an otherwise mundane morning. The icing came, thrice in fact, when I noticed a tweeny weeny brown delicate mushroom, a fist-sized bread-like mushroom and a small cousin of the well-known passionfruit climber on a fence. You can check them out at our photo gallery.
You know, these sights are not common in other parts of Singapore. The occurrence of big mushrooms along Tampines Avenue 10 was too high to be ignored. I started to wonder why. You can certainly expect to find fungi in soil almost everywhere, but their reproductive stage (what we called mushroom) only shows up when conditions (e.g. sufficient moisture and suitable temperature) are favourable. Given a tropical climate in a highly populated and urbanised Singapore, mushroom sightings along a heavily used road are a visual treat indeed. If you have noticed those tree trunks in my photos, they are thickly coated with black, black soot. And there, you have the mushrooms co-existing with us in a man-made and polluted environment. I amazed.
The next question which popped up was whether these white and brown mushrooms were edible and delectable too! Hee hee. Yeah. I’m a mushroom lover. Loves to look at them and also eat them.
I’m sure I’ve missed a whole lot more of living creatures along this busy road. Well, if the stirring comes by next time, I’ll be exploring further. Wait and see. :)
A selection of pictures can be found at our photo album right here.
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