Tuesday, January 26, 2010

You Eat This Mushroom, You're Gonna See Flying Purple Elephants






....or die more likely :P


I stopped by the Curbstone Valley Farm blog http://curbstonevalley.com/blog/, and saw that they did a weekly feature called 'Mushroom Monday'. I'm not going steal their idea and do this every week or anything, but it reminded me of a weird mushroom that Mr. A and I snapped a picture of.

We were on a weekend excursion to Raleigh, NC for my birthday last May. If we see that there's a cool state/national park in an area we're visiting, we always have to stop and look around or go for a hike. Nothin' like sweatin' on your birthday lol.

This is William Umstead State Park, in the Northern Raleigh area.


Beautiful place, we've been twice. They have such nice, soft walking trails that are so clean and pristine, you almost feel like you're in a movie set forest :)

We were walking along, and I spotted this mushroom. Most toxic looking mushroom I've ever seen! lol




The first picture shows more of a true-life colour than this one, but you can see what I like to call the cluster-mush. :)


Has anyone else seen this one before, or know what it's called?

8 comments:

Meredith said...

I have seen it here in upstate South Carolina ... but don't know what it's called. We went to some mycology club meetings recently, and I was so daunted by the prospect of identifying truly safe mushrooms (for culinary purposes only!) among so many different kinds that I gave up. I'll just stick to capturing them on film. ;)

Beautiful shots.

Kyna said...

Thank you!

I love the word 'mycota' :)

Curbstone Valley Farm said...

Glad we inspired you to post your mushrooms! It's difficult to tell for certain what this is. Do you know if this mushroom had gills under the cap? It might be Hygrocybe miniata:

http://www.mushroomexpert.com/hygrocybe_miniata.html

If you see it again, you can take one of the caps, and make a spore print to help with the ID.

http://www.mushroomexpert.com/spore_print.html

I usually just put one cap on white paper, and one on dark colored paper, and wait about 6-8 hours before peeking at the spore print. The color of the spores, and noting the gill color, can help narrow down species.

Kyna said...

Wow, you're really into mushrooms lol. No, I didn't do that, I didn't even know such a thing could be done to identify a mushroom. But now I wish I had :D If I see another one, I will. :D Thanks for the neat info, and thanks for checking this out! :)

Catherine@AGardenerinProgress said...

Well it's a really pretty one, but that's about all I know about mushrooms :)

Kyna said...

That's ok, I'm glad you took a look anyway :) It was a cool mushroom :D

Nell Jean said...

Very interesting little non-flowering plant you found. I didn't find one in my book that was exact. Were you there late enough to see if it glowed in the dark? It's significant that it was growing on wood -- hardwood or pine?

It looks as if something had taken a bite out of one. That wouldn't mean it was safe for us to eat. Somehow it just didn't look as if we should. Interesting post, thanks for showing us those.

Kyna said...

Nope, unfortunately we were only there in the morning and early afternoon :) And I'm not sure what type of wood that was...I was so fascinated by the mushroom, I forgot to take note lol. I'm not sure if it was orange because it was so bad, maybe it just evolved that orange colour so that animals wouldn't eat it :) But I wouldn't chance it lol

I'm glad you enjoyed my post! :)