Fifty mushrooms, one to a card, painted rather than photographed. Dr Sapphire McMullan-Fisher is a fungal ecologist, and the deck she wrote is laid out the way a naturalist thinks: each card gives the common name, the Latin binomial, a line on what makes that fungus worth knowing, and then short sections headed appearance, growth, notes and uses. Marta Zafra painted them, and the illustration is doing real work. A ghost fungus reads as pale green and faintly luminous. A Magellan's webcap reads as the startling violet it actually is.

The fifty include ghost fungus, spectacular rustgill, sky-blue pinkgill, trooping crumble cap, pink oyster mushroom, parrot waxcap, jack-o'-lantern, wine-cap stopharia, golden-scruffy collybia and velvet foot. They are drawn from around the world and chosen for interest rather than for the dinner table. Some are edible, several are firmly not, and the cards say which is which.

What it is good for is getting a foothold in mycology without a textbook, and it looks like something rather than nothing when it is out on a table. A boxed deck of 50 illustrated cards in a 135 by 95 mm box, published by Smith Street Books in April 2023. It is an introduction, not a foraging manual, and nothing in it replaces expert identification before a wild mushroom is eaten.