Texas
Mushrooms: A Field Guide – Susan Metzler, Van Metzler (1992)
I have always been fascinated by
fungi. They grow faster than most
plants. They move and grow like
animals. They feed off of decomposing
plant matter. They have an extremely
interesting life cycle. They create
fruiting bodies which are by turn delicious, toxic, beautiful, repulsive,
smelly, and mind-altering. Every culture
has some sort of tribal history that refers to mushrooms and the fungi in
general, for they are found nearly everywhere that humans exist. They are some of the most important yet
ignored parts of the cycle of life on Planet Earth. Since I am lucky to live in the humid and
temperate climate of Houston, Texas, United States, Sol System, Milky Way,
Universe, I have access to a huge variety of mushrooms year-round. While most people go off on excursions in the
early morning hours after a good rain, I find mushrooms all around me in the
apartment complex my wife and I reside in.
Being around them and spotting them on my daily dog-walks has become a
hobby of mine. Because of this I needed
to find a reliable and photographically illustrated guide to the mushrooms of
Texas. After some research, I found out
that there are not many such guides for mushrooms in general and definitely not
for the specific area of Texas in which I live.
The Metzlers are a couple who have
become amateur master foragers of mushrooms in Texas, and understanding that
others like themselves needed a good primer for collecting mushrooms in our
state, they set out to create just such a book.
It is a perfect book for someone like me, with a basic knowledge of
fungi, but with a desire to learn the differences between the different
families of mushrooms, and the way to identify which ones are delicious to eat
without poisoning myself. Luckily the
amazing M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston where I work had
this book on the shelves. I Love
Libraries!
Having looked through several
different field guides for mushrooms I instantly found this one to be great,
both for its ease of use, and for its clear colorful photographs of the
mushrooms which allow for far easier documentation and identification. Their descriptions are stated in a
non-technical manner, while at the same time providing the highly-technical
language of the mycologists used to designate the different species and
sub-species. To a nerd like me this is
as good as it gets. I will have to make
a point to purchase my very own copy of this book for my personal library. It has inspired me to meet up with the
mushroom foragers who hold semi-annual trips to the massive and
lush forests of East Texas to search for edible or useful mushrooms and to
educate those who attend about the forests, the fungi, and the relationships
they hold to the living plants. The following are two which hold forays around the Houston and Gulf Coast area.
Fungi are nature’s decomposers. Recently, scientists have been decoding the
genomes of various fungi species and have found that they are even more closely
related to animals than was originally believed. They are like some sort of organism
straddling the line between plant life and animal life. Amazing stuff! The mushrooms and puffballs that we all see
above ground are just the fruiting bodies of the mycelium, a web of fungi
sometimes acres wide that lives just below the surface of the soil, or the
forest floor, or on dead and rotting fallen trees. Many tree and plant species have
relationships with specific fungi, like the morel mushroom, which creates a
symbiotic relationship with forest trees like Pine, Poplar, and Oak. The fungus extracts certain minerals and
nutrients and binds them to the soil so that they can then be used by the tree,
while the tree helps shield and nurture the mycelium growing underground.
(This book can be purchased here: AMAZON )
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