Fairy rings are one of nature’s weird and cool phenomena, a circular formation of mushrooms growing on the ground. They can occur anywhere, from tundra moss to forest, but are most visible in fields and plains. Formations can be full circles of mushrooms, partial circles or arcs of mushrooms, rings and arcs of darker green growth without mushrooms, and areas with dead growth at the center. Rings start out small and grow outward. They can persist for hundreds of years and reach many yards across.
Modern science explains that fairy rings are caused by mushrooms growing beneath the soil. Over sixty mushroom species have been identified in association with fairy rings. However, because they are so visible and striking, people before the scientific era had all sorts of stories about what caused the mushrooms to grow this way.
The most common name, of course, is fairy ring. They have also been called pixie rings, elf circles, and fairy circles. All over Europe and as far away as the Philippines, fairy rings are associated with tiny spirits. Europeans believed the grass in the middle was dead because fairies had trampled it while dancing. Other cultures blamed witches or the Devil churning butter. Many tales recount the disasters befalling mortals who ventured into fairy rings.
But, in Tyrolia, legend held that these formations were caused by dragons. If a dragon flew by and stopped to rest, wrapping its tail around it, the heat of its body burned the ground. After that, nothing but mushrooms could grow for seven years or more.
Maybe Tyrolian dragons liked mushrooms for their supper?
Wyrmflight 
Very nice! Didn’t know about the dragon connection.
You can seem something similar with other organisms, the most spectacular might be with Redwood trees. A mother tree might spawn a ring of redwoods off her roots. In some cases a second ring can form even farther out. When the mother tree has died and rotted away, you can be left with two large rings of magnificent redwoods, which might make for a nice dragon-ring in a story.
There’s a ring like this you can see on the mountain route for Roaring Creek Railroad in Felton, CA.
While we were at the Olympic Rainforest this summer, we encountered trees that were standing on stilt-like roots, in close rows. It seems these trees had sprouted atop a stump or fallen log. The roots reached the ground and became thicker and stronger, while the host material eventually rotted away. This leaves rows of trees with interesting caverns under them.
Those are very striking trees, like giant bonsai 🙂 We get a lot of those growing over stumps from logging.
” a circular formation of mushrooms growing on the ground. They can occur anywhere”
Seriously? I have never seen this. Are you pulling my leg? I’d totally be taking pictures if I ever ran into something like this.
Yep, I could never make this stuff up! Here are some pictures: https://www.google.com/search?q=fairy+ring&biw=1235&bih=760&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=s7D_U6m1Bti5ogSx24HgAw&sqi=2&ved=0CCoQsAQ
That is pretty cool! I swear, if I saw that in real life I would scream aliens.
[…] stories from many different cultures. There are shape-shifting Hawaiian water dragons, Tyrolian dragons that make mushroom circles, a tree root-chewing dragon from Norse mythology, a three-headed dragon from Arabian legend, […]