Mushroom

As you will have gathered from the title, this is a book about mushrooms. Mushrooms are fungal sex organs and the most wondrous inventions of the last billion years of evolutionary history on earth. If you have missed out on these elemental facts of life, there’s no reason for self-flagellation—the next 200 or so pages will soon bring you up to speed. Mushrooms that appear overnight in a meadow or on a suburban lawn are a marvelous sight. Their growth process is pneumatic, with the inflation of millions of preformed cells from a button extending the stem, pushing earth aside, and unfolding a cap above the dewy grass. Once exposed, a mushroom’s gills—arrayed on the underside of its cap—shed an astonishing 30,000 spores per second, delivering billions of microscopic particles into the air in a single day, cells that may be capable of spawning the largest organisms on the planet. Mushroom colonies, gargantuan or lilliputian, burrow through soil and rotting wood. They feed and spread wherever plants live and die. Roll over a rotten log or brush aside some damp leaves, and you’ll find white bundles of fungal filaments; squeeze a handful of forest topsoil and inhale its mushroomy fragrance—the rich perfume attending death and decay. The colonies of many mushrooms hook into the roots of forest trees and engage in mutually supportive symbioses; others are pathogens that decorate their food sources with hardened hooves and fleshy shelves. Among the staggering diversity of mushroom-forming species, we find strange apparitions, including gigantic puffballs, phallic eruptions with revolting aromas, and tiny “bird’s nests” whose spore-filled eggs are splashed out by raindrops.