DIY Network

Mushroom Offers More Than Just Holiday Spirit

Master gardener Maureen Gilmer, host of Weekend Gardening, provides a historical reference to the connection between Christmas and a certain fungus.

advertisement

	Cover of, Mushrooms and other fungi of North America, by Roger Phillips. (Photos courtesy Roger Phillips.)
	The black morel, Morchella elata.
	The legendary red Amanita muscaria.

Great gift idea for a nature lover

By Maureen Gilmer

There is a great red mushroom that illustrates children's books and is surrounded by ancient folklore. Oddly enough, it can also be found on 19th-century German Christmas cards.

These are but two of the clues that connect 'fly agaric' mushrooms to our holiday traditions of reindeer, red and even Santa.

'Amanita muscaria' shares a link to Christmases in regions where reindeer actually dwell. In the wild, it seems, reindeer can't resist eating the mushroom's red caps. They were not actually poisoned, but do get intoxicated by the fungi. This relationship was noticed a long time ago by the Sami of Lapland, one of the oldest indigenous cultures in the world. Their shamans and some reindeer shepherds began to consume mushrooms, seeking their hallucinogenic effects as well. But the toxicity of the mushrooms makes them dangerously poisonous to humans.

It is believed that hallucinations of "high"-flying reindeer caused by mushroom ingestion inspired the myth of an airborne reindeer-drawn sled. The shaman himself wore a coat of red and white, representative of the mushroom's red cap with its raised white spots. This ancient mushroom connection showed up--and continues to do so today--by mushroom-shaped glass Christmas tree ornaments from Germany.

Flying reindeer and Siberian shamans dressed in red and white are only a small glimpse at the enormous world of mushrooms. Nowhere else is it more perfectly seen than in a new edition of the decade old venerable title, Mushrooms and Other Fungi of North America, by Roger Phillips, (Firefly Books).

The only limitation of the book is geographic; it features only our native mushroom genera, although some of these are globally distributed. This ensures that most of those you'll find in field, forest and fen will be included in the pages.

What sets it apart for beginner and aficionado alike is the photography. Much of it is large format so you can easily see the details.

So many other mushroom and fungal references are field guides and to be portable they are small format, with tiny pictures of in situ specimens.

Roger Phillips' pioneering in-studio photography lets you see each species of mushroom up close and personal. Phillips' book features 1,000 clear color studio-quality photos that take the guesswork out of identifying the various groups and species. In wild mushroom photographs the views are not as illustrative. Ground dwellers in shady dells offer little opportunity for super closeups without glaring lights.

Atop that is the fact that mushrooms and many other fungi are fast-growers. Their form can change hourly, altering their appearance and further confusing identification. This book solves that problem by painstakingly showing you the mushroom at many stages of growth, from small bud to fully open and decadent for easy side-by-side comparison.

Another helpful feature shows the mushroom cut into a cross section to reveal the anatomy inside. Phillips removes the cap to photograph it, providing you a precise top-down view of the color and density of spore bearing gills. Some views even combine the mushrooms with their associated plant communities such as conifer needles, hardwood leaves and mosses.

Each species receives a detailed profile of description, odor, texture, flesh, spore shape, habitat and range, season, edibility and occasional commentary.

Phillips is a fan of edible wild mushrooms. Therefore, the book is detailed to identify the edible mushrooms such as boletus, chanterelle, oyster, morel and others. However, the book's opening statement is a vital caveat. "Beginners should never eat wild mushrooms until they have had their own identification checked by an expert in the field."

The similarity of death cap, deadly galerina and poison-pie mushrooms with edible species is made all to clear in these pages.

As a gift for the nature lover in any family, the devout botanist or the magic mushroom aficionado, there is no better reference.

(Maureen Gilmer is a horticulturist and host of Weekend Gardening. E-mail her at mo@moplants.com. For more information, visit: www.moplants.com.

Get DIY On Your TV. Just follow the instructions to see if DIY Network is available through your cable or satellite provider.