WW: More oyster mushrooms

(Still Pleurotus ostreatus. I've posted on these before, but it never ceases to amaze me how attached this species is to the saltchuck. Rare just a few hundred yards inland, if you can smell the bay, this choice edible isn't just common, it's riotous. Something in the chemical signature of sea air.

The above photo documents just a few feet of downed big leaf trunk that's covered with them. And it's not the only host in this patch of woods, either; if I'd been of a mind, or just greedier, I could have had gallons.

But I only took about five stems, and am busy deciding what to do with them. [Among other things, oyster mushrooms are great breaded and fried, and make a worthy substitute for seafood or chicken in veganised dishes.]

A spring blessing that never gets old.)


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WW: Slough mushrooms

(Unidentified; growing on a maple log surrounded by water one to two feet deep.)

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WW: Jelly mushrooms

(This is Dacrymyces chrysospermus, the orange jelly mushroom. It grows on deadwood in moist forests – two things we have aplenty here on the North Pacific. It's also a winter harvest, making this fungus doubly useful, since it's eminently edible when sautéed in butter. )

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WW: LBMs

(I don't know what species this is, as I tend to ignore LBMs [little brown mushrooms], because they're hard to identify and not edible. But whatever they are, they were blanketing the ground under some pines.

Very nearly a lawn of mushrooms.)

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WW: A bounty of boletes

(Typical on the North Coast this time of year, where you can often fill a 5 gallon bucket with large boletes in a matter of minutes. Suspect these are Suillus clintonianus, the larch suillus.)

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WW: Oyster mushroom catch

(Found these while biking, growing by the side of the road. Interesting thing about the way Pleurotus ostreatus behaves in these parts: it only seems to grow within about a quarter-mile of the shore. I've found them many times, but always where you can at least smell, and often see, the bay.)

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A Lament For Graveyards

I augur this the right moment to mention my regret at the passing of graveyards, which ironic development has left my society impoverished to a few woeful degrees.

Many of these are practical. For starters, a cemetery contains a wealth of historical data not easily acquired else. Just the demographics are a treasure. Where did past inhabitants come from? What religions did they practice? What organisations did they belong to, and what was their mission? What light does this shed on the present community? What have we lost? What gained?

In a cemetery you're surrounded by the final statements of multiple generations, reflecting successive changes in values and perspectives. Whenever I move house, one of my first outings is the nearest graveyard. An hour or so and I've got an earthier, more visceral understanding of where I am, more tactile, if not easily quantified, than the one I'll get from the local history books I'll study next.

Burial grounds encode a lot of culture, and if you're paying attention, the whole site, properly examined, amounts to a book in itself.

Then there's the simple peace of the place – the leafy green, the tranquil refuge from the fretting living. I've often botanised and foraged in cemeteries, as being mostly uncrushed by the pounding fist of development, and am especially fond of them as a mushrooming venue.

And of course, there's the sacredness of remains, an instinctive, non-religious kind of consecration we've never fully replicated. (Some cultures – First Nations, Catholic-majority societies, traditionally Buddhist peoples, Celtic homelands – find similar awe in sites that don't contain reliquaries, but industrial values have undermined even their ability to transmit such reverence to recent generations.)

Institutional Zen, in its Confucian attachment to human authority, practices a heretical adulation of the dead – disturbingly, even of pieces there-of – and while I'm reflexively uneasy with this, I do wholeheartedly embrace the sangha of the past as an indispensible source of companionship and insight. Their presence is felt strongly in cemeteries.

Still – speaking of irony – no-one on either side of my family has been interred for 70 years, making us yet another cause of death to the dead. The usual suspects are afield: the extreme expense of burial, for the most part, but also a callow, pseudo-logical insistence that we've no need of graves to honour and remember our loved ones.

Which is, of course, tripe. I would in fact greatly cherish a grave where I could visit my parents and grandparents, and the dear regretted friends now leaving this world at ever-greater rate despite my pleading insistence they reconsider.

No, the nondescript region where we will scatter my mother's ashes will not replace her grave: that specific plot of ground where what's left of her articulated body would drift toward new and different existences under a solid square of stone that I can see and touch.

Not even almost.

And as I myself will also receive no such treatment, I must eventually commit the same sin of cenotaphery, and drive yet another nail into the coffin of, well, coffins.

Not that I'd impose a traditional burial on my survivors, of course. I get it; things have changed. And although I accept that as a Zenner, I do much regret my headstone. Because I've got the most awesome epitaph ever:

"Nothing is carved in stone."

How happy I'd lie below such a koan.

Good hunting to all of us on this, the annual Druid crusade to keep the dead dead.

(Photo of Tomnahurich, my favourite graveyard to date, courtesy of Derek Brown and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Coral mushroom

(Suspect Ramaria sp.; this is the mushroom I ate like so a few weeks ago.)

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WW: Coral mushroom scramble

(Scrambled eggs and coral mushrooms foraged in the forest last week comprise this delectable disc. I didn't bother to ID the fungus, but believe it was Ramaria. Chopped celery leaves round off the feast. Or maybe finish off the round feast.)

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WW: Late fall oyster mushrooms

(Panellus serotinus; identification informal, but I believe these are them. Don't eat any based solely on this photograph.)

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WW: Witch's butter

(This is Dacrymyces chrysospermus, also known as orange jelly or witch's butter. In spite of its otherworldly gelatinous texture and neon colour, it's remarkably good eating, and omnipresent on the North Coast at this time of year.)

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WW: Extraterrestrial squid monster

(A whole patch of these boiled to the surface this week. I forgot to put something in the photo to give scale, but they're huge; this one is the size of a grapefruit. They're Astraeus pteridis, the bracken, or giant hygroscopic, earthstar. First I've encountered them.)

WW: Boletes by the trail

(I believe these are Suillus tomentosus. One way or the other they're edible and choice. We got a great harvest this year thanks to heavy rains at just the right moment, followed by several sunny warm days.)

WW: Spring stirfry

(The giving season. Morels [Morchela conica] and fresh asparagus.)

WW: Golden waxy cap

(Hygrocybe flavescens.)

WW: Old picnic table

(Gathering more than moss.)

WW: Righteous cluster of oyster mushrooms

(Pleurotus ostreatus.)

WW: Rare mushroom

(To the best of my ability to determine, this is the European honey mushroom Armillaria cepistipes. In the late 90s, specimens collected by mycologist Tom Volk led to the first positive ID of this species in North America, at a site in the Olympic Mountains. That's just across the bay from the site of this photo. These two were part of an effusive inflorescence growing in the litter of a well-rotted log. [A former trunk of Acer macrophyllum, unless I miss my guess.]

I ate them.)

WW: 'Nother earthstar

(Geastrum saccatum; a clearer explanation of the common name
than I uploaded last autumn.)

WW: Rock tripe and turkey tails

(That's Bjerkandera adusta on top, with a flush of Trametes versicolor below. Another excellent photo by Trent Dejong.)