MY, OH MY, OH MYCOLOGY!

Lydia Gilbert,  a distant great-grandmoher, was hung as a witch in the Salem Witch trials. Ann Putnam, great-grandmother x7, was the one who started the accusations of witches. My paternal grandmother ran off with the hired man in the 1940s, long before that sort of thing was popular.  A few generations back, a cousin brought down the Jackson, Michigan banks with a slight accounting error and some lame attempts to cover that up. It’s really quite a diverse collection of relatives, don’t you think?

I suppose everyone’s family tree has memorable characters, but few can rival the stunning variety displayed by the fungus family. A Fungal Family Reunion includes mushrooms, mosses, molds, rusts, mildews, yeasts, and smuts. (Oh, come on, admit it-your family has some smutty members, too.)  In fact, the fungus family is not really a family at all, taxonomically speaking; it’s an actual Kingdom, parallel to Plants and Animals. It includes 200,000 species. You can include Lichens, too, because they have such an intimate, symbiotic relationship with fungi. Hey, everyone has a symbiotic uncle hiding somewhere in the family branches.

Our woods is overflowing with fungi of every shape: round, cup, shelf, coral, spindly. And every color: yellow, orange, read, gray, white, pink, and black. Some are firm, some squishy and wet. All of them are releasing spores aplenty. 

To underscore their amazing diversity, consider that different kinds of fungi are:

Delicious sautéed on your rib-eye
 Poisonous

Injected into you to save you from infections

Good at controlling insects

 Able to destroy the loaf of bread you just got from the health food store for $6 a loaf

Likely creating that unbearable itching between your toes

Breaking down plant materials to feed other plants and trees

Making you sneeze your brains out 

Controlling erosion

Destroying entire crops

Being rooted out by hogs and dogs in France so they can be served in fine restaurants, probably by waiters who have jock itch caused by another fungus altogether

A Fungal Gallery

Black Jelly Drops?

Coral Fungus

Devil's Urn?

Don't know its name, but I'd call it
Old Woman's Hiney.
Which is why they don't let me name fungi.

  

Giant Puffball

 

Crustlike Cup

Bird's Nest Fungi

 

 

Pigs' Ears

Scarlet Cup

Stinkhorn
Very well named, too!

And - Tonight's Dinner!

Tomorrow and Sunday--the last two new postings for the Iowa County Almanac,
#99 and 100.
It will remain on line for a while, however.