The Mushroom Garden: The Art of Adam Oehlers

The Mushroom Garden really has to be seen to be believed. British artist Adam Oehlers both wrote and illustrated the mesmerizing tome over the course of five years, creating a surreal yet highly detailed, fully imagined world of a mushroom garden through which a character known as the Girl moves—and sometimes is trapped—during the changing seasons. The garden shifts in epic fashion. The mushrooms shrink, grow, multiply, rise like boulders, and release spores that soar through the air and wrap around her. It’s like some kind of Wonderland (or Slumberland; I thought of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo often as well), teeming with mushrooms of every kind. It’s all gorgeous and more than slightly mad—in the best possible way, of course.

I asked Oehlers how the idea for the book came to him, and he explained that when he and his wife (the artist Nom Kinnear King) lived in the Norfolk countryside, they’d often take long walks over Knettishall Heath. One afternoon they came upon a scene that struck a particular, magic chord: a tumble of fallen trees and branches covered entirely in a wide variety of mushrooms. “I remember feeling as though we’d stepped into a whole other world, a labyrinthine microcosm, and it utterly blew my mind,” he says. The experience inspired him to create what was meant to be a one-off piece about a girl in a mushroom garden, but once he’d finished that, he could not let the idea go. He kept wondering about the Girl and what had called her to the garden. To answer those questions for himself, he created a second artwork, and he just kept going. Which is how books come to be.

Research helped with inspiration. Oehlers has always loved mushrooms—their come-hither looks, their connections to classic fairy tales and folklore—but when he began studying them, their wild names sent his imagination spinning. “The girdled knights,” he marvels, “the tawny grisettes, the deceivers, the funeral bells, the cavaliers … All those names painted such incredible pictures for me. They gave these mushrooms their own individual purposes, and the characters and world just started to grow.” And it’s still growing. Since The Mushroom Garden’s release in 2021, Oehlers has been working on a second book that takes place in the same world, this time in the “wilder lands that surround the Mushroom Garden.” But of course he’ll return to the garden itself, and we’ll be there too, eager to step inside.

See more of Adam Oehlers’s work at adamoehlersillustration.com and find copies of The Mushroom Garden at nomadicalley.bigcartel.com.