fairy rings

rings found in grassy meadows, once believed to have been produced by dancing fairies. [Br. Myth.: Brewer Dictionary, 345]

See: Ring, Magic

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Fairy Rings

circles formed by cap mushrooms. Fairy rings are often found in meadows, more rarely in forests. The formation of fairy rings depends on the centrifugal growth of the mycelium in the soil, on the periphery of which fruiting bodies of the mushrooms are formed each year. From year to year the diameter of a fairy ring increases by 8-50 cm, and over a number of years the fairy ring may attain a diameter of several dozen meters. Within the fairy ring the grass is usually dwarfed because the nutritive substances and water are used by the mycelium, which competes with flowering plants; in old fairy rings the mycelium in the center of the ring dies off, and the grass develops more luxuriantly. Fairy rings are formed especially often by the fairy-ring mushroom and meadow mushrooms.

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References in periodicals archive

(4) A color reproduction of George Cruikshank's painting A Fantasy: The Fairy Ring (c.1850) is reprinted with permission in Fimi (15).

The Hobbit and the Father Christmas Letters

Those are the fairy rings. We are the people who can't see out--or the ones who can't see in.

Road to the golden age: Thoreau's old Carlisle road

To find out more about Fairy Rings and their control/ management why not visit www.grassclippings.co.uk So, look out for the fairies at the bottom of your garden, you never know where they might be sitting!

Look out for the fairies in your garden; Notebook: Best of the Bunch Fairy rings

Q WHAT can I do about a fairy ring of toadstools that appeared in my lawn last year and is now back again?

How can I get rid of this fairy ring? TRICKS of the TRADE

Symptoms: Fairy rings are circles approximately 3 to 8 ft.

First aid for your lawn: 5 remedies for your hurting turf

If fairy rings are your problem, they're harder to deal with.

GARDEN Q&A

'Fairy rings' on the other hand are caused by fungi and are evidenced by two circles of very lush, green grass forming within each other accompanied by toadstools.

It's lawn time; Gardening advice with Janice Casault of Wenvoe-based StyleGardens.www.StyleGardens. co. uk

Throughout the film, he follows true believers to fairy rings or the sites of close encounters between human and spirit.

THE FAIRY FAITH IN THE REALM OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE

What's there, besides the hissing Interstate with its huge snow fences like sutures in the earth, besides the jackrabbits and sketchy antelope grazing the distance, the great preponderance of sky, the paradox of crossing the Divide twice to cross it once, is a lushness of small bright things: hardy, civil grasses; humble yellow and dove gray and blue mosslike plants; splashes of blue, orange, and yellow lichen on red, red rock; little fairy rings of blue pebbles that memorize where a willing flower thrived and died, and prove there isn't enough rain to scramble them back from symmetry.

Great Divide Basin

To interpret the phrase in The Tempest in this way makes more sense of the clause which follows |Whereof the Ewe not bites', since ewes would naturally want to eat succulent grass but are turned away by the bitter fairy rings. This interpretation also provides a neat contrast so typical of Shakespeare and it allows us to place the caesura in the most natural position.

'Do the green sour ringlets make' ('The Tempest' V.i.37)

Fairy rings are commonly-found arcs of fungus, so don't be a disbeliever.

FACT OR FICTION; gardening You could have fairies on your patch

Grassland fairy rings are formed and expand when spores drop close to and around the parent toadstools, thus increasing the diameter of the fungal patch each year.

NATURE WATCH