Fall fungi

This was our most spectacular find. It's called Chicken of the Woods in our area (Pennsylvania).

You can see how big it is!

There is something almost magical about mushrooms. They seem to appear from nowhere, popping up overnight and then popping down again. Actually, a mushroom is only the fruit of a fungus. The true fungus is typically a tangle of fine threads, called a mycelium, which is found underground. The fungus fruit, or mushroom, contains spores that are like tiny seeds that can produce more fungi and more mushrooms. The mushroom pops up out of the ground to spread the spores.

One year in late August, we were hiking in a deep forest with my dad, a life-long mushroom enthusiast. He veered off the trail and we followed him into the shady, secret, steamy understory, where lush ferns grew on crumbling, mossy logs. The forest floor was carpeted with layers of damp leaves. We saw some familiar brown mushrooms, delicate and long-stemmed. Then we saw a large white mushroom. Then a lemon-yellow mushroom with white scales, a flat red mushroom on a curved white stem, a bright yellow mushroom with a pleated cap, a completely blue mushroom, a waxy green mushroom, leathery purple bracket mushrooms growing on a tree trunk, a sticky orange-yellow mushroom with branches like coral, and a colony of tiny red cuplike mushrooms. We seemed to be walking in an enchanted garden with very odd flowers – leathery, feathery, slimy or wooden, velvety or crumbly, stinky and musty, tiny and large. Mushroom-flowers.
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One thing I learned was that fall is a wonderful time to look for mushrooms. Bob and I have been mushroom hunting in our woods all week. This is what we found.

All photos, copyright: Toni and Robert Albert