Woodland foraging with Tim Maddams | The wild mushroom hunt

It's late summer, the point at which trees stop growing and start storing – banking sugars for the winter ahead. It matters to what grows underfoot. Most of the mushrooms Tim is after aren't parasites, he explains, they're mycorrhizal fungi, living in a quiet trade with the trees around them: the mycelium threading through the soil pulls minerals a tree can't easily reach on its own, and in return the tree feeds it sugar, made in its leaves, sent down through its roots. Mutually beneficial. Symbiotic. "You do get a big bloom of what I'd call the really delicious ones after a long stretch of warm weather followed by a good bit of rain," Tim says. There's been precious little of the second part this year.

The first proper find is a prime example of one fungi species pretending to be another. Bright orange, growing in a cluster out of rotting wood, it looks, for a hopeful half-second, like a chanterelle. It isn't. "This is a false chanterelle, which a lot of people say is poisonous," Tim says, crouching over it. The tell is in the underside: true gills, not the shallow ridges of a real chanterelle, and a colour that leans more orange than yellow. It's a lesson in not trusting your own excitement. Your brain wants to find chanterelles, Tim says, so it will.

Better luck a few steps on: a shingled hedgehog, freshly emerged and still faintly sweet-smelling. "A delicious, well worthwhile edible," Tim says, popping it in the basket slung across his back. Nearby, a blusher – edible too, though not a favourite of his – its cap scattered with loose, moveable scales, its flesh blushing pink wherever it's nicked or broken. Small, quiet clues. Tim reads them the way you'd read weather.

Then the moment he's actually been hoping for... Half-hidden at the base of a tree, a squat, pale-stemmed mushroom that makes him drop to a crouch. "Come down here with me," he says. "This is forager’s gold..."

It's a cep – porcini, if you're buying it in Italy, where they don't much bother splitting hairs over which closely related bolete it technically is. "They have a brilliant attitude towards this in Italy," Tim says. "It really doesn't matter whether it's a true cep or not." He turns it over, checking the stem, decides he isn't quite mycologist enough to be certain of the exact species, and decides he doesn't much care either. "What we've got here is a primo porcini mushroom, in great quality," he says, genuinely delighted. "Given how dry it's been, I really wasn't sure we'd find one. There it is." A touch of early maggot damage, nothing that will stop it going in the pan.

We headed back to the car. A short drive away was a known (but quite secret) chanterelle hotspot.

And so it proved to be... Not the one or two Tim had cautiously predicted, but broad patches of them, the sheer volume of it something he reckons foragers from further south never quite believe until they see Scotland for themselves.

Not that Tim wants to turn anyone into an expert, but take friends out mushrooming, he says, and they spend the whole walk pointing to every unfamiliar cap and asking what it is.

Eventually you have to stop them: there are millions of species of fungus in the world, and today he's interested in about five – the ones that look like this, this, this, this, and this. Learning the rest is worthwhile, he admits, and genuinely fascinating, but it tips you over from forager into mycologist, and he'd rather stay a food-focused chef who knows a handful of mushrooms very well.

That doesn't mean he's blind to the bigger picture, though. Fungus, he points out, is what turns rock into soil in the first place – lichen and mycelium breaking down minerals into a form plants and trees can actually use. We rely on that hidden network. Picking a few mushrooms for supper is a small thing set against that.

Before the woods properly close in, Tim points out a few things worth knowing along the way. Rosebay willowherb, or fireweed, grows everywhere along the treeline: in spring it can be eaten young, a bit like asparagus; now, past its flowering, it's the unopened flower heads you want, fermented overnight in a damp tea towel, then dried for tea.

There's an elder bush, its berries still small and green with the dry summer – “once the berries are ripe, add a load to some red wine vinegar, leave it a couple of weeks, drain it off, and it’s absolutely tremendous." Nearby is a young rowan, too, its berries almost but not quite ready either. “They’re better cooked into a syrup or jelly,” Tim says.

It's a reminder that woodland foraging isn't only about mushrooms, and that most of what's edible out here asks for very little in return – just an awareness of what you're taking, and how much. It's mostly about slowing down, Tim says of foraging in general: not stripping everything you find in the excitement of the moment, not damaging what doesn't need damaging, and leaving anything you can't confidently identify exactly where it's growing, since it might be rarer than it looks. Leave nothing behind except footprints, in other words, and take only what you'll actually use.

That last part matters a great deal with mushrooms. Tim's rule, repeated more than once, is to treat any mushroom you can't identify at first with total certainty – particularly within the first three times you've picked it – as one to check properly once you're home: a spore print taken, a written description read in full rather than just a photograph glanced at, the whole process gone through before deciding it's safe. The stakes, he points out, can be the same with plants as with fungi. Cow parsley and hemlock water dropwort look almost identical to an untrained eye. One is a good foraging find. The other can kill you.

Not everything demands that kind of caution, though. A little further on, a patch of wild raspberries, "doing a great impression of cultivated ones," bearing ripe fruit all at once in a way wild raspberries rarely manage. Tim doesn't bother gathering many – they are too soft to survive the walk back – and instead does the sensible thing, stopping for five minutes to pick and eat a few as a snack.

Back at the kitchen, the day's finds – chanterelles, the cep, the shingled hedgehogs – get exactly the treatment Tim thinks wild mushrooms deserve: not much fuss at all. He's not one for scrupulously brushing every last speck of woodland off them, just flicking away anything obviously chunky and moving on – "life's too short." A quick sauté with a little garlic, before the mushrooms are spooned onto the top of a pizza, with a scattering of sweet, barely-cooked tomatoes and not quite as much mozzarella as you'd think. It isn't a recipe so much as an argument for eating what you find the day you find it, cooked simply enough that the mushrooms stay the point of focus.

Watch Tim's full woodland forage – ceps, chanterelles and all – on Schöffel Country's YouTube channel, then see what your own local woods have to offer this season. And if you missed it, go back to part one, where Tim raked the Scottish coast for cockles