Funny fungi

I've done this a lot before, photos of fungi, it's that time of year. I've even got a tag for them. That's rather the problem with this kind of blogging, and of life in the countryside, I suppose. The seasons have a habit of coming round again and again with much the same features. Or perhaps it's not a problem. 

Anyway, fungi continue to be weird and wonderful, these were all found in the garden, a more appealing thing to be doing there than sweeping up leaves.

The above growths appear in the holes left in eucalyptus trunks, when branches split and break, as they often do. I wonder why a non-native species should so readily host passing fungi, but I don't really know anything about it.

The frilly orangey ones below, at different stages of their fruition (for mushrooms and toadstools are all fruiting bodies) are all over the ground among the leaf litter:

I've only tended to edit them a bit by deepening the shadows to accentuate the form, but with the two below, as I'd got a bit carried away with the digital zoom on the camera and they looked rather odd and fuzzy, I put a 'lomo' filter on them in Picasa, for fun: 

Change, death and decay, that's fungi for you.

Weirdest and most alien and macabre of all are these earth balls, puffballs' dark doppelgangers:

It's their planet really, theirs and the insects'. We're just passing through.