
While taking a guided tour of Are Gardens from the knowledgeable and effervescent Jasper Parrish, we stopped at the crowning glory of the gardens - the magnificent Sporae Floridus Fructificatio Frondens. This is the only flowering, fruiting, leafy fungus in known existence and, as Jasper said, is only possible due to cross-pollination between mycological and botanical species that do not grow in proximity in the wild. I couldn't tell how many different eukaryotes went into this spectacular, vibrating, breathing organism, but the longer I looked at it the more I realized it was looking back, from several fungal faces.
Then the pink mushroom person above Jasper's head on the right piped up and began to cheerfully contradict everything he was saying, clearly just to get a rise out of him, and it worked. Jasper became annoyed and started debating, seemingly forgetting he was leading a tour. The rest of us eventually got tired and all wandered away to look at other things, leaving Jasper to his fruitless annoyance.