I was raking leaves and uncovered the little dudes in the picture. More raking showed they came up in a circle, like a fairy ring. My plant ID app says it’s called shaggy mane. It’s also known as lawyer’s wig, but I will not be putting it on. In a fit of optimistic ignorance, I took the pieces I’d accidentally raked and tossed them into one of my new terraforming beds with the fragrant sumac and the cardinal flower. I muttered incantations about mycorrhizae, like that would make it so.
I’ve been looking, but I suspect shaggy mane is not mycorrhizal. Mycorrhizae–as those of us with pretensions to terraforming other planets know–are underground fungal strands that bring nutrients to plant roots. They are all the rage in gardening circles, and you can buy the stuff today, here on Earth, to grow better plants.
I think the shaggy mane is not a mycorrhizal free trader but a decomposer, what are called saprophytes, which break down wood and create soil. Fine. Maybe I’ll wind up with fairy rings of shaggy mane in my garden bed. I say this because earlier in the summer I stuck some logs in there pretty deep, and the experts say shaggy mane is often found above buried logs. Why people bury logs in a circle, I don’t know.
The shaggy manes proved to be foreshadowing. Terraforming research for the final Martha’s Sons led me to Paul Stamets and his book Mycellium Running. It’s all about how to inoculate wood and soil with mushroom spawn for food, restoration work (which is a lot like terraforming, but on this planet), medicine, and more (ahem) magical experiences. Stamets is the guy in the hit documentary Fantastic Fungi, which also covers each of these topics and is stunningly beautiful. Which is probably why it’s a hit, and not because of any magical discussions.
More recently, I noticed another fungus growing on an oak log on the ground. We had had a dead oak very close to the house. I would have left it up (it wasn’t terribly big), but every now and then the husband gets a say in what goes on in the landscape, and he didn’t want it falling on the house. I explained how once it was dead we called it a snag, and look at all the birds eating insects from it. That was a good thing.
But, no. It was too close to the house. So we took it down, but left a stump about five feet tall. For the birds. I kept all the other wood in short logs on the ground, because that’s my biomass and I don’t give that up lightly anymore. It’s future soil.
Now that I’ve seen the colonizing volunteers on the logs, I’m thinking the stump, too, could get colonized by the little fungal fans that have sprouted on the logs. They might be turkey tail, which would be a great terraformer.
It’s fascinating to watch it all creep around. I keep picturing mycelial mats working away on other planets, terraforming barren rock worlds into someplace habitable. Life could do that.
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