Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson

 I attended an event at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival at which Sion Parkinson was speaking and I bought the book after the event. 

This beautifully illustrated book offers a fascinating and often eccentric look at the famously smelly group of fungi known as stinkhorns, a wider look at the relationships between smell and sound and the relationship between bad smells and epilepsy (which the author was diagnosed with a few years ago). The book takes in everything from natural history to the music of John Cage (who himself was fascinated by fungi).

The stinkhorn fungus itself is not only smelly but noisy. The reader's first reaction to that comment might be an impatient 'oh for goodness sake, fungi don't make noises' but "The audible hum in the space surrounding the stinkhorn does not, of course, resonate from the mushroom itself, but is the sound produced by a swarm of several species of fly that are almost always found about it. ... Houseflies hum not with their mouths but with the beating of their wings... in the key of F major. The noisier blowfly Collophora vicina one of the most frequent flies to visit the stinkhorn, flaps its wings at a more bassy .... pitch somewhere between D and D sharp".

This is one of the things I liked most about this book, the way it forces the reader to think about our senses differently. The occasional reaction of 'oh for goodness sake' quickly becomes 'wow, that's fascinating'. 

Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson, published by Sternberg Press.  

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My latest Substack post 'Why Did I study Botany?' is now up! You can read it here.