Haibun 2 Mushrooms

WHR June 2015

Haibun page 2

Haibun

MUSHROOMS

Anita Virgil

Undisturbed

my garden fills

with summer growth—

how I wish for one

who would push the deep grass aside.

Izumi Shikibu (11th Century )

tr. Jane Hirshfield, The Ink Dark Moon

Boletus badius

Since earliest childhood I was charmed by this opening stanza of Oliver Herford’s “The Elf and the Dormouse,”

Under a toadstool crept a wee Elf,

Out of the rain to shelter himself.

I doodled pictures of it. Made houses in my mushroom drawings with curtained windows in the cap and a tiny door at the base of the stem! But not for thirty years did I return to these mysterious little non-flowering plants.

One summer morning my next-door Ukrainian neighbor invited me to join her on a mushroom hunt. Through the steamy, buggy woods we trekked, me trailing behind, watching her suddenly stoop, dig up some oddity or other, plop it into her basket. Intrigued, but in complete confusion, I wondered: Why this one? Why not that one? Some red ones were my favorites, but at the end of this hunt, her basket contained a captivating diversity of colors, shapes and textures.

That adventure sent me on a trip to a library that afternoon where I found a National Geographic magazine with an article on mushrooms. There were photos of various red mushrooms—and one like what my neighbor picked was poisonous. Panicked, I rushed home, stopping first to knock next door. There was no answer. I envisioned death. Irrationally, left a scribbled note of warning about the red mushrooms. For days after, I heard her voice as usual in the yard with her child.

Russula xerampelina

My careless appraisal had been mistaken. But in that single day, my world took quite a shift: I began an avid search for mushrooms. A perfect time it turned out to be for it was extremely rainy that year. Mushrooms popped up everywhere!

Collecting mushrooms from my lawn and woods in northern New Jersey -- wandering across the road if I saw something, I returned home and laid the specimens on a stone table and photographed them with a Rollei. Without a close-up lens it was impossible to capture the fine distinctions of each specimen. So I decided to paint each one. Actual size. Then took notes describing all details. When each portrait was done, I sliced the specimen in half lengthwise and took more notes about the interior structures. Drew them too. One day a neighbor saw me digging mushrooms, stopped and talked. He was a retired biology teacher and said he no longer needed his Field Book of Common Mushrooms [Wm. S. Thomas, Putnam 1928] for I complained to him that in our local one-room-in-a-house library there was nothing. So it was I began to keep records of each find to help me identify my mushrooms in the future. I still have that well-worn book.

Russula brevipes

Sticking on the mushroom,

The Leaf

Of some unknown tree.

Basho

Haiku , Blyth Vol. 3, p. 313

I came across references to mushrooms in literature: in Alice in Wonderland [p.73, 104], Lewis Carroll has Alice “mushroom nibbling” until she was a foot high!

Amanita muscaria

This is a yellow version of Amanita muscaria which is usually red capped. Poisonous --depending on the quantity ingested. Eaten for its mind-altering property, Siberian shamans used it in small doses to induce trances. (There are other psychedelic ones: genus Psilocybin.)

Once I began searching regularly for mushrooms, the neighborhood children followed me on my rounds. Fascinated by the real things I taught them about mushrooms. What child has not been enchanted by story book illustrations of fairy rings? I know I was.

Who is not captivated at the notion of elves, leprechauns, fairies dancing round on the grass all night long, leaving a flattened circle of crushed grass edged with mushrooms ? From an old poem “The Fairy Ring”

Oh, have you seen the fairies dance

Upon a Summer’s night?

And watched the gnomes and pixies prance

Whene’er the moon is bright? . . . “

But outside those strange circles, the grass grows lush green. Why? The secret behind this phenomenon is simply the nature of the mushrooms’ underground propagation and the resultant nitrogen release. It is not make-believe. No more than forests at night are haunted because something in the dark glows green. . .That is the bioluminescent orange Clitocybe illudens, or Jack o’Lantern mushroom.

The inaccurate generalization “toadstool” bears more connotations of fear of the unknown. Actually, it stems from the German word todt which means death! Other misconceptions passed on for generations include the ‘test’ for poisonous mushrooms: Put a silver coin into boiling mushrooms. If the coin blackens, the mushrooms are poisonous. There is no safeguard besides learning to meticulously identify the species picked for eating. Ideally, mycologists will microscopically examine the spores. I never had that capability, but used countless books. And now the internet can help to some degree on the subject. As with using any nature field guide, my joy was derived from identifying the uniqueness of each. (Eating them—as do mycophagists—was not my objective.) So the neighborhood children were left with strictest cautions never to eat what we picked! One special child I kept in touch with through his whole life, retained an enduring interest in fungi. [See: A SENSE OF MYSTERY, World Haiku Review, December 2012]

As my knowledge of mushrooms was expanding, I was also learning about haiku. Centuries before, Japanese poets were writing about this pursuit. Issa spoke of the deceptive appearance of mushrooms:

Lo! the mushrooms which kill people—

they are beautiful, as I thought.

tr. Asataro Miyamori Haiku Ancient and Modern, p.542

In We Have Always Lived in the Castle by the brilliantly quirky Shirley Jackson, she has this retort about a deadly Amanita so like the yellow-capped A. muscaria--but with a gray-brownish cap: “I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet and Amanita phalloides , the death-cup mushroom. “ And later she merrily continues tormenting her relatives merely by enumerating scientific facts about different mushroom poisons.

In no time at all, I learned about that death-cup as a major identifying characteristic. When finding some of these most poisonous mushrooms nestled in forest litter, one only sees part of them. That limited view can seem nearly identical with a similar-looking edible mushroom. Quite a case of Russian roulette. It is what gave rise to my haiku

knifing deep

into earth seeking

the whole mushroom

Virgil

A 2nd Flake 1974

To compound the difficulty in mushroom identification with its maddening subtle distinctions ( most obviously color), there is the inedible Amanita flavaconia with a red and/or orange cap, sometimes with pale dots of yellow on it, white gills and flesh and a pale lemon stem , white bulbous base underground. An American edible look-alike is Amanita jacksonii with a sack cup. Then there is a choice edible southern European mushroom called Amanita caesarea -- also with a sack cup. Yet to the untrained eye, these bear strong resemblance to the red-capped variety white spotted Amanita muscaria with its different shaped death-cup! The latter are familiar as Christmas tree ornaments, in illustrations, on greeting cards, etc. That one, as mentioned, is poisonous.

In The Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn [p.167], a conversation ensues among the patients about the supposed benefits of the birch bark mushroom. The mushroom protruding from the birch bark is the fruiting body responsible for reproduction--like an apple is to its tree. By the time they emerge, there is usually on-going interior damage and the tree eventually dies. It is destroyed from the inside by the fundamental part of the fungus called the mycelium: hair-like whitish tangled threads--but not “roots. “

Polyporous betulinus

As with fairy rings, it is this hidden mycelium depleting nutrition from the grass that causes the damaged “danced upon” look. But it is how the outer edges display the mycelium’s end-product:

new mushrooms.

The old name of this fungus was Polyporous betulinus when I first found and painted it. Now it is alternately known as Piptoporus betulinus -- commonly named birch bracket fungus or the deer mushroom. Not poisonous but tough and bitter to the taste. In The Cancer Ward, one muzhik believed this mushroom ground up to make tea was a cancer cure. . . “The letter is quite to the point: It tells how the chaga should be pounded and how it should be mixed. But I think that if this drink had cleared through the departments, the nurse would be bringing it to us. There would be a barrel of it out on the landing.” Nonsense? Modern studies mentioned in The Hiker’s Notebook, Feb. 3, 2010 , find it indeed has various medicinal benefits! It can be anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, even anti-tumor and anti-viral. Őetzi, the Neolithic “Ice-man” disinterred in 1991 in the Alps, had two slices of P. betulinus threaded on a thong around his neck. Presumably ancient experience yielded some healing benefits we are only now investigating.

From The Diary of Virginia Woolf, [Vol.1 August 1917] comes this: “Found mushrooms, mostly in the hollow, enough for a dish. “ Next day: “Got plenty of mushrooms.” And still during that August, “To get mushrooms & blackberries . . . “ but late in the month, repeated entries state “No mushrooms” or “Few mushrooms” concluding with “The mushrooms seem to be extinct .” Likely because the weather was hot and dry by then. Usually there is a quiet period until once again there is lots of rainy weather which the mushrooms love.

My voice

Becomes the wind;

Mushroom hunting.

Shiki

Haiku, Vol. 4 , Blyth p. 138

the woods grow cool

here a purple mushroom

there a blue

Virgil

One Potato Two Potato Etc 1991

Emily Dickinson wrote: “The mushroom is the elf of plants, At evening it is not . . . ”

Coprinus atramentarius

Possibly she spoke of one of the Coprinus or ink cap mushrooms whose gills deliquesce [auto-digest] its cap. In a single day leaves nothing but the stem and a puddle of black ‘ink’ around its base. For the artist, too, prompt identification of ink caps determines painting priority. Early morning, ovoid caps hide much of the stem. As caps open out and begin to dissolve, you can literally gauge time by this painting. In addition, for the mycophaghist, these are choice--unless wine accompanies your breakfast or lunch! But there are daintier mushrooms that come with dawn and dry up in the heat of a summer day : Panaeolus foenisecii, the Mower’s mushroom, or some evanescent Psathyrellas --with or without their own danger.

about the wet grass

under the morning stars

gray cap mushrooms

Virgil

Haibun Today, “Gray Hair Silver Hair” June 2013

Colette, the great French writer has this passage in Retreat from Love, 1907. It portrays the prevailing ignorance, the generalizations and folklore that surround mushrooms.

“I sat down on a carpet lined with pine needles and carefully peeled a young mushroom that was covered with grass as fine as hair. It was moist and cold, as pearly and tender as a lamb’s muzzle and so tempting that instead of putting it in the basket, I chewed it raw; it was delicious and tasted of truffles and earth.”

“What are you eating?” cried my friend.

“Mushrooms.”

“Good heavens! She’ll poison herself! Marcel, stop her . . . . “

True, this is very possible when one does not study a lot about these intriguing denizens of the earth. Many who have always included wild mushrooms in their diets, select them based only on observing their antecedents’ choices. Occasionally death occurs from a single mistaken identification even among those who ate wild mushrooms for years. In the 18^th century, Charles VI , The Holy Roman Emperor, last of the male line of the Habsburgs died of mushroom poisoning. “In October, his cook had prepared a stew of mushrooms, which the Emperor, always hungry after a day in the field, ate voraciously. He was violently sick in the night . . . was rushed back to Vienna, vomiting and fainting along the way. . . [for a while] he seemed better but on the following day he had a relapse . . . and died.” [ The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire, Andre Wheatcroft Penguin 1995.] These fatal cases occur worldwide. An entire Russian family of nine died after eating mushrooms for their meal. It happens, for example, when a picker thinks he is choosing the edible Lepiota naucina or an Amanitopsus vaginata. Both can be white. So is the deadliest snow white Amanita virosa , the Destroying Angel.

Amanita virosa

While at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2000, I was surprised to come upon a glass case of mushroom paintings by Beatrix Potter. From her early years, she had the same scientific fascination with mushrooms and painted them. “I have been drawing funguses very hard; I think some day they will be put in a book. . . “ [The Tale of Beatrix Potter by Margaret Lane, Warner 1946].

Mushroom-hunting;

Raising my head,--

The moon over the peak.

Buson,

Haiku Vol. 4 Blyth, p. xxvii

Through the years, I continue to find myself in good company with my odd passion for studying mushrooms. Even as I write this, I am reading Goodbye to All That, the autobiography of Robert Graves. He recalls a happy childhood visit to his grandfather near Munich: “Pine forests and hot sun, red deer . . . [and] nine or ten different kinds of edible mushrooms which we went into the forest to pick.” [p.22] But typically, the dangerous ones capture our attention, just as my ignorance caused me to alert my neighbor that what she picked was poisonous! Over the years, I found out it was but one of several red and white Russulas, which are edible. However, Russula emetica, is not deadly though listed often as poisonous because it causes vomiting.

When I had amassed many paintings and still had no reference books to speak of, I took a trip into New York City to the New York Horticultural Society. I carried a wicker picnic basket filled with my tiny paintings. I knew I’d finally come to the right place for as far up as my eyes could see were book-lined galleries. I was told by the first person who saw my work to wait. Next thing I knew, the Director came down the stairs and asked to see the art. Right then, he invited me to give a one-woman show of them! “But I came here to borrow books !” I fretted. . . .

After telling the Director those two four-foot square columns that rose three stories high needed a coat of fresh paint before I’d hang my work on it --and his prompt compliance—I set up the exhibit over the following weeks.

While at the Horticultural Society, I learned the iconoclastic musician, John Cage, was Co-founder of the N.Y. Mycological Society. The society sent him invitations to their shows. But to the amazement of the staff, he attended my reception. We corresponded thereafter. About my artwork he said: “I think your work is excellent and I hope that you will find a way to have it properly published.” [Feb. 18, 1972 pers. corres.] And we spoke about another shared interest: haiku.

As part of that show of eighty paintings, I displayed the following two specimens together for the express purpose of showing how similar different mushrooms can look. The Entoloma cetratum are poisonous, and the Marasmius oreades are imminently edible. I often picked and ate their caps for they grew in quantities at the grassy edge of the sidewalk where I lived at that time. The characteristic of all the Marasmius is their tough cartilaginous stem.

Entoloma cetratum Marasmius oreades

Without the chemical magic of the approximately three thousand or more species of fungi in the world, our very soil cannot be replenished. The poet Sylvia Plath ends her poem “Mushrooms”:

We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek,

We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth.

Our foot's in the door.

Photo: Amanita virosa public domain

Fairies & mushrooms: Richard Doyle public domain

Engraving of actual fairy rings public domain

Author’s Note: Readers can Google images of all mushrooms mentioned herein.