Monster mushroom

Except on a thick crust, surrounded by pepperoni, olives and cheese, I’m not all that enamored with mushrooms as an item you put in your mouth.
With all due respect to many of my nature brethren, you can even have my allotment of morels in the spring. I just don’t have much of an appetite for fungus. Obviously Lewis Carroll and J.K. Rowling had a taste for toadstools in their respective classics, “Alice in Wonderland” and the Harry Potter series.
Yeah, and look what happened to Alice – not to mention all the funny shenanigans at Hogwarts U. Frankly, even if they weren’t so bland, I just don’t like consuming something that’s called a toadstool.
But, hey, I think their cool to look at – especially if you’re into sci-fi flicks like “Alien.” Once when I hiked the Wonderland Trail that encircles Mt. Rainier, I was dumbstruck by the hundreds of varieties. It was as though the forest was an extraterrestrial incubator.
And although the spring is generally thought of as the prime time for mushroom harvesting, I have been amazed at how many different fungi I have come across this fall in my yard and near my bow stands. Guess its all the rain – or space invaders.
Darrell Webb is a mushroom devotee from nearby Buckner. The guy knows his stuff, and, in fact, won the highly regarded Richmond Mushroom Festival one year with a 16-ounce morel. And even he is finding things coming up that he’s not all that sure about.
He brought one to the Burr Oak Woods Nature Center recently to see if naturalist Lisa Richter might help identify the creature – uh, toadstool. Actually, it wasn’t one mushroom; it was hundreds coming out of the mycelium, or the food-gathering base of the fungi.
Actually, it was kinda creepy. From a short distance it looked like the brain from a T-Rex. It was a large, weighty mass about the size of a throw pillow.
Even Lisa, whose husband is a botanist, could not positively identify it. Or least to the extent that she was ready to say it was safe to nibble.
“But it is a beautiful bunch of mushrooms, and even if you don’t eat it, it is beautiful to look at,” she explained to Darrell.
Together they scanned both his reference books, and the books at the Nature Center. Darrell’s find had characteristics of some mushrooms, yet distinctions of others. They could find neither a photo nor a description that fully recognized this one.
Spooky, huh?
“I think it’s a false honey … at least that’s the name that a friend who found it growing in his yard gave it,” Darrell did say, however. “But we’re going to take some spore prints and do some deeper research on it.”
The problem is that there’s a honey mushroom, but no false honey mushroom.
“Apparently they grow very rapidly,” he continued. “Two days ago the thing was about the size of the top of a pop can and in that time you can see how large it’s grown into.
“It is a wonder to look at and to see how many mushrooms in that cluster. It’s amazing. I’ve been mushroom hunting close to 50 years and I’ve never seen anything like this – either in the woods or outside of the woods.”
Mushrooms as a food source are dicey. Some are edible for some of us, but that same mushroom can make others ill. Some mushrooms are hallucinogenic. Some are medicinal. And some are downright toxic.
Lisa warned Darrell accordingly, especially since there was no positive ID.
“If you’re not POSITIVE what species it is, we don’t recommend eating it, period,” she said. “Some people can’t even eat morels. With all mushrooms we always say eat at your risk … be very cautious.”
Yeah, I think I’d pass – except on that family-sized, pepperoni/mushroom/cheese/olive thick crust. Indeed tasty, but with its own set of its unfortunate aftereffects.