Wild Wednesday: Fruiting Body

I took this photo of part of a Monkey Puzzle Tree (Araucaria) on my phone this afternoon, on a trip to Belsay Castle in the grounds of Belsay Hall (an English Heritage property in Northumberland). It's a big tree and has a few of these spherical lumps on its branches - I guessed they were fruiting bodies and subsequent Googling has revealed that this was correct. I'd photographed the whole tree but decided that this cropped shot was more interesting.

(Thanks as always to Cailleach for running Wild Wednesday.)

We'd been on a real trip down "Memory Lane" with my Dad to recognise the 10th anniversary of the death of my lovely Mum. My two brothers joined us to make it a proper family occasion. We started off at my Mum's woodland grave, then had a pub lunch at the "Dyke Neuk" pub: we kept our family caravan in a field there for weekend escapes over a few summers in the 1960s. We finished off at Belsay Hall which my parents used to visit regularly in their retirement.