photos from the edge 07 - Mushrooms

 photos from the edge 07 - Mushrooms

I love mushrooms because of their mystery.  When you get down on your knees, close to the pine needles where they grow, in the wet spongy earth after the first rains of the fall, the world looks strange and ancient.  Their round bulbous and conical flesh pushes through a carpet of thin needles and rough branches, where they seem to come from another hidden world.

These mushrooms appeared in November, in the pine forest of MacKerricher State Park on the coast.  As I wandered through the trees, the fog filtered through the branches and the surf pounded and hissed on the sand at the forest's edge. Walking through the trees, trying to avoid stepping on the mushrooms themselves, I was still stepping on a lliving being under the forest floor.

The mushroom is the fruit or reproductive organ of a much larger living organism that is truly hidden, the mycelium.  One mycelium network, Armillaria Solidipes, is 2000 years old and is over three miles across.  The first mushrooms appeared on earth 800 million years ago, so as humans, we're just a blip in their history.  And since scientists believe that the organism communicates through mycelium, and that it even has learning capacity and memory, perhaps they have some knowledge of that time, when they were alone on the earth.