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    Common Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast
    Common Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast
    Common Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast
    Ebook125 pages38 minutes

    Common Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast

    By C. Leonard Fergus and Charles Fergus

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Handy in-the-field identification guide. Features the "Foolproof Five." Includes a useful identification flowchart.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2003
    ISBN9780811742696
    Common Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast

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      Book preview

      Common Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast - C. Leonard Fergus

      1858

      Contents

      Introduction

      Important Parts of Mushrooms

      Some Common Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast

      Identification Key

      Gilled Fungi

      Boletes

      Polypores

      Toothed Fungi

      Coral Fungi

      Club and Funnel Fungi

      Sponge and Saddle Fungi

      Puffballs

      Destroying Angel

      Mushrooms by Month of First Appearance

      References

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      My father, C. Leonard Fergus, lived from 1917 to 1986. When he brought out this booklet on mushrooms in 1960, he was a professor of mycology and plant pathology (fungi and plant diseases) at Pennsylvania State University. The booklet, a basic guide for beginning mushroom hunters, was originally published by Penn State’s College of Agriculture under the title Some Common Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of Pennsylvania. The forty-three mushrooms described herein have a greater range than Pennsylvania, and this publication is pertinent for northeastern North America, roughly from the Mississippi River east and from Virginia north to southern Canada. Many of the species also occur in the Midwest and the South.

      For years, different people have suggested that I republish my father’s booklet, long out of print. I have a fair knowledge of mushrooms myself. When I was young, my father often took me along when he went collecting specimens to show to his students or to place in the university’s Mycological Herbarium, of which he was the curator. I could recite the scientific names of many fungi before I knew my multiplication tables. Looking for mushrooms was a treasure hunt, with my father’s approbation the reward when I spotted a colorful cap tucked away in the leaf mold or peeking up at the base of a log. Much later, as a science writer at Penn State, I took my father ’s advanced mycology course—the last time he taught it before he retired. We keyed out many specimens and also studied mushrooms under the microscope—their gills or spines or pores, their spore-bearing structures, and the spores themselves—which revealed another level of beauty in those mysterious, ephemeral fruits.

      The mushrooms in this book are like old friends to me. I have dined on the edible ones and admired and photographed many others. Mushrooms are evanescent; they are the outward evidence of unseen organisms dwelling in trees and the earth, and they appear like spirits. It still thrills me to find a ring of Meadow Mushrooms newly sprung up in a pasture, a troop of King Boletes on the forest floor, the dazzling irruption of a Sulphur Shelf on an oak stump, or a Destroying Angel standing ominous in its cloak of white.

      A word about taxonomy. As they are wont to do with all living things, scientists classify fungi: they place them in groups and give them names based on their physical characteristics. In a booklet of this scope, one need be concerned only with the categories genus and species. Take the dramatic, dangerous Destroying Angel as an example: it is assigned the scientific name Amanita virosa. This signifies that it belongs to genus Amanita (from the Greek amanitai, a fungus), a related group of numerous attractive fungi, many of them poisonous; and gives it its own identity as the type or species A. virosa, Latin viros for poisonous.

      In updating my father’s text, to keep pace with scientific advances in mushroom classification, I have changed the taxonomic names he used; alternate or former names are included in parentheses. For each species, I checked in current guides and made sure my father’s original description was accurate. In some cases I added new findings or pertinent information that may have been left out of the original publication because of space constraints.

      I was fortunate to locate the original negatives for the photographs illustrating the different mushrooms. The glass plate negatives were being stored in a sturdy oak cabinet at Penn State’s Mont Alto campus near Chambersburg. (As of this writing, the negatives and mycological specimens are scheduled to be transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, Maryland.) Lee O. Overholts, a professor in the botany department of Penn State, had taken the photographs mainly in the 1930s. I want to particularly thank Herb Cole and Eva Pell, Penn State faculty members and administrators, for making it possible for us to reuse those excellent images.

      A mushroom, no matter its shape or color or size, is

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