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It seems to me that it is not really possible to learn to recognise mushrooms only by books, it is so much easier with plants. With mushrooms one does need to be guided in the forest by a mushroom expert.
It is definitely not possible without books, the differences between one species and another don’t stay very easily in memory just from guiding and demonstrations. So it is with all other learning, so many of us carry such a lot of acquired helplessness with us. That someone should come and show again and again, explain everything, teach us to become experts. It seems to be a problem particularly for those who pay large fees in higher education; some of them simply demand that intelligent thinking be hammered into their heads. But on the other hand – a wise teacher is always worth having.

Does working with fungi change people in some way, have mushroom experts something in common?
Maybe not just working with fungi, but really seeing and observing – as opposed to just watching, as watching TV – nature can make a difference. To everybody. Being a scientist forces people to honesty, to discard deception, to consider all things critically; if this is not possible to a sufficient degree the scientist will be caught in a split personality or schizophrenic tangle. Some take to drink, others become bad-tempered and mean.

 If fungi make up the third realm, besides the animal and vegetable kingdoms – are you, as Senior Mushroom Master, a citizen of that third realm?
Dividing living nature into a few kingdoms belongs to teaching in elementary school, later, nolens-volens, we have to be more exact in our model of the world. The evolutionary tree of nature has many branches and divisions, far more than three. There is a very nice expression in English for this concept: tree thinking. Sadly a word-by-word translation into Estonian would give us „wooden thinking”, and this expression simply doesn’t work! I see myself as a quite ordinary representative of a somewhat freakish species belonging to the hominids.

 When did the understanding that fungi are quite different from animals and plants reach broader groups?
Really already thousands of years ago. Probably this was why they were left out of the Bible. In Genesis there is no mention of creating fungi, so obviously they were left for the Devil to invent. Estonian universities taught their specialness already more than fifty years ago, elsewhere this understanding came some decades later.

What did our people know about fungi in the old days?
In eastern Estonia a little, maybe some ten-twenty genera or species were recognised. In western Estonia nearly nothing at all – why dignify these slippery sheep and cattle toadstools with individual names.

Which place in Estonia means most to you?
The old broadleaf forest below the chalk cliffs between Saka and Ontika, from 1945; the pine forests in Nõmme, and the Mustamäe juniper dunes, from the time when there were no houses. And a thousand more places.

 Do you always look for fungi in nature?