Fairies in the Yard

Have fairies danced in your yard? — they have in ours and in neighborhood yards too.

According to legend, fairies or pixies often gather at night. Dancing in a circle, wearing down the grass and leaving a trampled ring of brown or dead grass. A day later, mushrooms spring up encircling the dance ring. It's been said that since toads sat on the mushrooms, they became referred to as “toadstools.”

Many believed fairies caused this phenomena and called the circles fairy rings, fairy circles, or pixie rings.

A mushroom ring provides the most obvious evidence of these rings. When "fairy" ring mushrooms first appear, there are numerous fruiting bodies (mushrooms) that look like small bulbs on top of long stalks. 

When mature, mushrooms are large and the bulb expands. The circles are the result of a pattern of mycelium growth. 

Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus and is the underground organism that produces the reproductive fruit bodies known as mushrooms. The circular growth pattern is a factor of soil type,condition, soil nutrients, obstructions underground, and dirt composition. The ground needs to be even and well composed, which is why the rings appear on lawns.

The organic matter that fairy rings break down is often tree stumps, roots, logs, and pieces of organic material in soil below the lawn. As these depletes, the fairy ring(s) disappear.

Several fairy rings may look together on lawns that were wooded. Yet, they don’t cross each other; fungal activity stops when fungi from different rings contact each other. (It seems mushrooms are not as social as they look.)

You can only notice these rings once mushrooms crop up on grassy lawn areas. However, the circular mycelium underground is always present and growing.

Yes, I believe that fairies dance in the rings on our lawn.

And, just wondering . . .

Do you believe it too? ('tis the season for believing)