The Coral Reefs of the Forest Floor

a closer look at mushrooms is always worth a moment

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I used to call mushrooms the funny little flowers of the forest floor. But over time, I’ve come to appreciate them as a bit more than blossoms (though, as you can imagine, I am also an enormous fan of blossoms!) I’ve come to think of them more like the terrestrial interpretation of coral reefs, bringing a structural element to their ecosystem that extends far beyond the life of each individual.

In a coral reef, lots and lots of tiny lives pile together in one space. They live and die as individuals, but they connect in communities, and they build structure over the course of their generations. Those structures grow and expand, bringing together opportunities for other members of the ecosystem to live and die and gather and grow.

The nature of the forest is that resource limitations require diverse communities to interconnect and interact. Sunlight is far above; nutrients are locked up tight below. For the high canopy and the understory canopy and the mosses and ferns and fungus all to have access to the things they need, they need to tap into a network that allows them to trade and share. They just can’t make it work without each other.

And that, of course, is a key role that mushrooms play. The thing about mushrooms is that they are so very architectural, so very much a web of infrastructure that deeply connects far-flung margins of the forest. The mushroom matrix is ever-present beneath the surface, breaking down nutrients in the soil, transferring them through filaments criss-crossing the forest floor, interlacing and overlapping in layers and corridors, endless variations on an essential theme.

And they do it so beautifully! While most of the functionality of the mushroom’s life is sort of invisible and utilitarian, they do, of course, eventually bloom into the realm of our awareness.

We have many, many mushrooms in our forest, and I know only a few of their names. This is, in part, because they are so fleeting and can be tricky to identify! You can get to know a plant over many months, and its blossom is distinct. But many mushrooms look so much alike that you must bring a sample home and put it under a microscope to tell them apart! I often content myself with grouping them into a general category, and just appreciating their beauty…

These may be Amanita or Agaric types, always so delightful with their fairy-tale spots…

This is an Elegant Stinkhorn. Elegant, I suppose, because it is pink…

Although this Common Stinkhorn seems just as elegant to me, in shades of silver and cream - and neither seems very elegant at all with a name like Stinkhorn!

Earth Tongues come in black…

…or yellow.

And while many forest mushrooms are smooth and shiny, some are velvety.

And some are incredibly tiny.

Mushrooms can be funny about timing. They’re very particular, in many ways. They persist beneath the surface for long stretches of time, nourished gently by the forest floor and perfectly content among their underground networks. But they each have a rather narrow band of acceptable conditions for blooming, specific preferences for temperature and season and moisture, so that their blooms are a bit more like forecasting the weather than watching the calendar. Roses may bloom in June, but these little colonies of red mushrooms appear only after it’s been warm enough for long enough, but hasn’t been too dry for too long, and probably very suddenly after a gentle rain.

It’s a really special balance of mystery and familiarity. The basic patterns are consistent, but the details are just a little too complex to fall into a regular routine. So you get to be surprised!

But also, if you were to slow waaaaay down, and take your time to observe, and to follow, and to study, and to consider, you could learn the blossoms of the woods just as well as you know the flowers of the field. You could expect their sprouts and clusters with as much certainty as the violets in the spring and the goldenrod in the fall.

It’s a warm kind of closeness, knowing you could run into an old friend at any moment - and also knowing there is a lifetime’s worth of getting to know them better.

So go find a little woodsy mushroom, and take a moment, and take a closer look, and connect with the network that’s connecting everything around you! 🧡🍄🍄‍🟫♥️

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