Mushrooms of Cascadia, Second Edition

Introduction

This story begins in the spring of 1968. I was a chemistry graduate student at the University of Washington and recently married to my life partner, Ann, then a fellow graduate student in chemistry. We were given a small bag of freshly picked morels that we sautéed for dinner. The flavor was rich and reminded me of a fine, tender steak. That fall, we took a non-credit mushroom identification class taught by Dr. Daniel Stuntz at the University of Washington. The first Pacific Northwest mushroom clubs were just being formed, and only one small book was available for identifying Pacific Northwest mushrooms: Margaret McKenny’s The Savory Wild Mushroom. I wanted to know all there was to know about mushrooms, and I am still learning fifty-five years later.

In the fall of 1972, I began my thirty-two years on the faculty of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. My initial assignment was to work with independent-study students. A small group of students wanted to learn about mushrooms. Olympia had been the home of Margaret McKenny, who had died a few years earlier. She was an Audubon member and had started the tradition of a mushroom show every fall. It was at the Audubon Society Mushroom Show that I met Dr. Alexander H. Smith from the University of Michigan and Kit Scates from Post Falls, Idaho, both there to help with the show. Dr. Smith was then the leading North American mycologist, and he would return often to visit Evergreen and observe the amazing scanning electron microscope work that my student Paul Stamets was engaged in. (Dr. Smith did not have access to an SEM at the University of Michigan.) Kit Scates (later Kit Scates Barnhart) was an English teacher who was fascinated by fungi but frustrated by the lack of mushroom identification resources. Upon learning that Dr. Smith often spent his summers working at the Priest River Experimental Forest in Northern Idaho, she gathered all the different mushrooms she could find and drove north to meet him and learn about the mushrooms she was finding. It was the beginning of a lifelong association. At Dr. Smith’s suggestion, Kit took on the study of coral mushrooms, especially the genus Ramaria. Kit became my mentor, and I inherited her fascination with coral mushrooms and indeed all fungi. My mushroom endeavors suddenly became serious.

I have since hunted and photographed mushrooms from Anchorage to San Diego to the Rockies, as well as occasionally on the Eastern Seaboard from Newfoundland to Georgia and the upper Midwest. My photo collection has shaped this book. Cascadia alone is an area with more than 4,500 named species and at least 12,000 more species still unnamed. Some are seen reliably every year (and are the focus of this book), while most are rarely seen. Many of these same species, or sister species with the same properties, are also found in the Midwest and the East, as well as in Europe, Eurasia, and Asia, and thus you can use this book to help identify choice edibles and safely steer away from potentially deadly species in all temperate ecosystems. While the exact chanterelle species, oyster species, Hericium species, matsutake, or truffle may differ in various parts of the world—and there will be differences in flavor; you will learn to recognize the genera—and thus what is edible and what is a dangerous poisonous species. If you identify a mushroom as the Alice in Wonderland mushroom, Amanita muscaria, you may in fact have a look-alike if you are not in Europe, but it will have the same toxins. The Amanita species known as destroying angels and death caps may be genetically slightly different in various parts of the world, but they are all deadly.

Incidentally, names of fungi (and, indeed, all living organisms) have been slowly evolving over at least the past several hundred years. However, recent advances in DNA technology have greatly accelerated the rate at which organisms are reclassified. Even popular sources for learning current “correct” fungal names, such as Index Fungorum and MycoBank, are struggling to get ahead of the current deluge of new names and may disagree with one another. If you use this book for scientific purposes, be prepared for many more changes. In fact, already much has changed since I wrote the first edition.

Throughout this book, I have indicated where a name change may already be required by using single quotation marks (for example, ‘Mycena’ acicula means that a new genus is needed for the species mentioned, and Mycena ‘amicta’ means that the genus is not likely to need changing but the species epithet may change). When a specific new name has already been suggested, but not yet published, I have added n.p. after the name (for example Amanita lindgreniana n.p.). When there are several very similar species and some are unnamed, I have used “group” at the end of the species name. Completely unanticipated name changes may also arise. I will post updates and new species that I discover on my website, www.mushroomsofcascadiadotcom, and I post all new discoveries on iNaturalist under the name organicgardner44.