Park Grzybowy in Piłka: sixteen mushroom models in the Noteć Forest

Sixteen castings on one hectare

The village of Piłka lies in the Drawsko municipality of Wielkopolska, in Czarnków-Trzcianka county, among the pines of the Noteć Forest. On one hectare of that forest the local authority laid out an educational nature trail and set sixteen oversized mushroom models along it. The Drawsko municipal office page gives the figure plainly and then adds forest animals to it, so the animal figures are extras rather than part of the sixteen. The municipality names a stag and a wild boar among the trees, the county portal adds a roe deer, and anyone counting every sculpture on the site will arrive at more than sixteen. There is a difference of scale as well: the mushrooms are enlarged, while the animals, the county portal says, are modelled life-size.

The material comes from the owner itself. The municipal page describes exhibits made of polyester resin and fibreglass, with the characters of each species and the surface texture reproduced in detail, and the county tourism portal repeats the same account of its giant mushroom models. Their height is on far shakier ground. The range of 0.5 to 3 metres appears solely in the Polish Wikipedia article, referenced there to an information board standing outside the municipal office in Drawsko — an object nobody can consult without travelling to Drawsko to read it. No official source available online states any dimension, so the figure travels here marked second-hand, which is how it should be read.

The municipal page names what has been modelled in one sentence: amanitas, parasols, morels, scaber stalks, chanterelles, bay boletes, a fairy ring champignon, a common inkcap, slippery jacks, knights, saffron milkcaps and one outsized cep. It misspells the inkcap, writing czerwidłak where Polish has czernidłak, that is Coprinopsis atramentaria — worth knowing if you try to match a label against a field guide. Twelve names, most of them plural, do not map one to one onto sixteen models, and the first of them repays attention: in Polish, muchomory covers the fly agaric and the death cap alike, so a single path carries casts of species whose confusion kills.

The labelling is real. Every mushroom species is described and several larger interpretation boards stand about the site, according to the county portal, and the municipality adds that the boards exist so that visitors can walk the trail unguided. The portal also prints a schematic map of the municipality suggesting where five named mushrooms may be found in the surrounding forest. This entry records that the map exists and deliberately does not repeat its suggestions: the subject here is an outdoor display, not a foraging guide.

A municipal project, not an institution

The park opened on 23 June 2013. The county portal gives that date, the Polish Wikipedia entry repeats it with no footnote attached, and the municipality's own live page gives no date whatever — which is why the county page is the source of record here rather than the more obvious one. The investor and owner is the Drawsko local authority, not the State Forests and not the neighbouring forest district. Eighty per cent of the cost came from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development, under measure 413 on implementing local development strategies within Poland's 2007–2013 Rural Development Programme.

Ownership shapes what a visitor should expect. There is no curator, no accessioned collection and no research programme. There are benches, gazebos with tables and a trail through the trees, with a playground beside the park, and the municipality mentions toadstool-shaped playhouses and rockers for younger children. The municipality advertises the site as the first mushroom park in Poland, the county portal repeats the phrase, and the Polish Wikipedia article narrows it to the first Polish theme park devoted to fungi. All three sentences trace back to the owner. Nobody has established that precedence independently, and this entry reports the claim rather than endorsing it.

Resin caps, real woodland

Two things are easy to run together here. The exhibits are castings, not fruiting bodies and not herbarium specimens. The ground beneath them is a genuine hectare of the Noteć Forest, where fungi come up as they do across the whole district. The municipal page says as much itself while describing a kayak trip down the river Miała along the park boundary: the footbridges, it writes, will allow mushroom picking in the riverside copses and in the park itself.

None of which means a model teaches identification. A cast fixes outline, colour and the proportion of cap to stem, and those are precisely the characters the deadly species share most convincingly with the edible ones. It cannot carry a smell, will not bruise blue when cut, drops no spore print, hides no volva under the litter and does not change across a week of rain. The trail is a sound introduction to names and shapes. It is not a key, not a fresh specimen turned over in the hand and not the judgement of somebody who knows the species by sight, and nothing here recommends picking inside the park or settling a question of edibility against a sculpture.

Getting there, and what is actually on the record

Admission is free — the county portal says so in as many words — and nobody publishes opening hours, because this is open ground rather than a ticketed site with a gate. The honest statement about hours is simply that no official source gives any. A teacher planning a school visit is better served by telephoning the Drawsko municipal office than by trusting a timetable found online.

The location deserves a warning before you set off. This entry uses the OpenStreetMap position — way 617705422, 52.7862° N and 16.0592° E — because that is the mapped outline of the park itself. The Polish Wikipedia infobox instead gives 52°47′23.67″N and 16°03′17.64″E, half a kilometre away, and the county portal supplies a third pointer, a postal address at Folwark Piłka 22. All three land in the same corner of the forest but not on the same spot, and pretending otherwise would help nobody standing among identical pines. Aim for Piłka, look for the board at the head of the trail, and settle the rest with your own eyes once you are there.