Outdoors: The Amazing World of Fungi, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh

Given the choice of sneakily popping a tasty grape in your mouth at the supermarket or trying to stuff a raw mushroom into your gob, I know which one I'd choose. However my fungus-loving child, Hope, could always be found chomping on a mushroom as we did our weekly shop.

I was given an edible mushroom guide book as a gift, and was full of great family foraging intentions. Yet the fear of misidentification so terrified me that pretty sharpish the book was back on the shelf. Oddly Hope, although quite young, used to request this volume for a little light reading before bed. She got pretty good at memorising the different pictures and used to chant their names before adding whether they were "tasty, tasty" - ie edible, or rather quaintly, "not tasty", shorthand for poisonous. Strangely the "prince", "fairy ring champignon", "tawny grisette", "ink cap", "deathcap" and "sickener", all do sound rather like characters from a fairytale.

Hope has since moved on in terms of her bedtime reading but I was keen to see whether the allure of mycology could still captivate her with a trip to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and The Amazing World of Fungi exhibition.

Once we made sure our feet had been properly disinfected to help prevent the spread of fungal disease, sudden oak death, which is rampaging across the UK, we skipped happily along the trail of fly agaric images to the start of the exhibition.

Both of my daughters were in their element with their hand-held audio guides. Surprisingly they did actually take the time to listen to the commentary and they loved the interactive audio points dotted throughout the exhibition. The first corridor of the exhibition leads visitors through a darkened tunnel, in which we learned that most of a mushroom's structure, the mycelium, is web-like and exists under the ground.

What we would recognise as fungi are just the fruiting bodies which poke up through the ground to spore. You weave your way beneath giant model toadstools which illustrate the gill structure under the cap. There is a fine example of a giant puffball and there is even a glow-in-the-dark fungus, which was quite tricky to see.

Poisonous mushrooms and the public don't mix so the Botanics have plumped for life-sized models of a range of fungus in a display case. Hope dashed straight over and spotted two of her favourites, the "shaggy parasol" and the "devil's bolete". Eve loved the stop-motion footage of mushrooms growing and the light-up quiz on which mushrooms are safe to eat.

The next colourful room dealt with mushroom-induced influences on literature and music, featuring Alice in Wonderland and some Sixties beats, before leading on to a more scientific room exploring yeasts, used in everyday items and the medical discovery of penicillin. The final room explored composting and decay, with a terrifying screen showing a speeded-up rot fest, which may be familiar to many parents with teenagers who don't like tidying their rooms. We had such a great time that after a quick scamper through the autumn leaves in the gardens, we rushed back for one last return visit.

From Another Kingdom - The Amazing World of Fungi, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh until Sunday 21 November, free.

www.fromanotherkingdom.com

This article was first published in The Scotsman, 16 October, 2010