Fabulous Fall Fungi
Fly Amanita
When I opened my mushroom book recently, a sheath of loose-leaf paper fell out, with notes on various mushrooms that I had brought home for identification a few years ago. I still remember that day, when I laid the mushrooms out to take spore prints, and recorded their colour, texture, smell, growth form and habitat, trying to identify them (I did figure out some, but not others).
Fungi are a world unto themselves, being neither plants nor animals. Fungi do not have green chlorophyll like plants do, and cannot, like plants, manufacture their food from sunlight. Instead, fungi live off organic matter from living or dead plants and animals, and reproduce by simple, microscopic units called spores, rather than seeds. Continue reading »
