First, you name its habitat,
Woods or pastures, hill or flat.
Under just what tree it grows,
If a preference it does show?
Is it single, caespitose,
Or gregarious and close?
Next its pileus or cap,
All these features you must map.
Color, texture, size and shape,
Nothing must your eye escape.
Is its margin involute?
And in age does it upshoot?
Is it glabrous (smooth) or not,
Viscid (sticky) or somewhat?
Does its color change when bruised
To pink or black or lovely blues?
Then the lamellae you take,
Saying gills is a mistake.
Color, shape, and size of them,
Grown to or quite free from stem?
But this stem you must call a “stipe”
Tell unerringly its type.
What you never, never do
When picking is to cut it through.
You must have the whole of it
Or descriptions will not fit.
Is it bulbous, is it thin,
Hollow or with stuff within?
Has it scales or annulus
That’s the ring, contrarious,
For it makes you want to swear
It so often isn’t there.
Next a spore-print must be made,
Note each slightest tinge or shade.
Lilac may as white be classed,
Cream, as ochre-spored, alas!
Spores require a microscope,
or with them you cannot cope.
Size and shape again you note,
Tho they’re tiny as a mote.
Last you take your books – a lot
One may give it, one may not.
Now you know the nomenclature,
You can hunt without ill nature.
So search with greatest care,
Offering up a fervent prayer.
But, O hell!! You tear your hair!
You cannot find it anywhere!!
Mrs. Morton A. Gibbs,
San Francisco |
The mushroom is the elf of plants,
At evening it is not;
At morning in a truffled hut
It stops upon a spot
As if it tarried always;
And yet its whole career
Is shorter than a snake's delay,
And fleeter than a tare.
'Tis vegetation's juggler,
The germ of alibi;
Doth like a bubble antedate,
And like a bubble hie.
I feel as if the grass were pleased
To have it intermit;
The surreptitious scion
Of summer's circumspect.
Had nature any outcast face,
Could she a son condemn,
Had nature an Iscariot,
That mushroom, --it is him.
A poem by Emily Dickinson
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