Whether it is sizzling and oppressively humid, if the air appears riddled with flying bugs, and if ticks wave from trail-edge grasses, the mushroom gods are smiling on you: It’s time to hunt chanterelles, the delectable ectomycorrhizal mushrooms that fruit after rain has fallen on hardwood forests. In New York’s Hudson Valley chanterelles seem on the claustrophobic top of summer time, on the leaf-littered ground beneath their partner-trees. These warm-weather mushrooms additionally develop within the firm of some very curious vegetation, whose habits and look are as fascinating because the mushrooms themselves, giving us a glimpse of the teeming subterranean world beneath our mountaineering toes.
Let’s stroll. Carry bug spray.
Images by Marie Viljoen.
Since chancing upon our first chanterelles in 2018, on a hike an hour north of Manhattan, my husband and I’ve made a hopeful pilgrimage to the identical spot nearly each summer time. (We needed to skip 2020 as a result of the trailhead’s parking space had been remodeled right into a drive-in COVID testing website.) Within the inexperienced shade of the cloyingly heat summer time woods, we stroll swatting at bugs, largely no-see-ums intent on sipping from our eyeballs earlier than changing into trapped in our lashes. There’s numerous swearing. And sweating.
Every stroll’s mid-point is a stream the place we dip our toes into the clear water and picnic within the firm of tiny crayfish and minnows.
We even visited final yr, in denial throughout a months-long drought that crisped the understory and all however dried up the stream. Evidently, the mushroom world was silent. We questioned if the chanterelles would survive in any respect. How resilient is a mycelial community? Do their partner-trees’ roots hold them alive?
Mycorrhizal mushrooms develop in symbiosis with inexperienced vegetation; every advantages from the connection. Ectomycorrhizal mushrooms like chanterelles type sheaths over the foundation suggestions of those vegetation, on this case explicit species of bushes (right here, most likely oaks). The mushrooms make minerals from the soil accessible to the bushes, and the photosynthesizing bushes ship down carbohydrates from the cover.
One of many first vegetation to greet us as we stroll is pipsissewa, Chimaphila maculata. Additionally recognized generally as prince’s pine and noticed wintergreen, its distinctive evergreen leaves are a welcome sight even on probably the most bitter of hikes in the midst of winter. Proper now winter appears inconceivable. It’s a privilege to see the beautiful vegetation rising right here at frequent intervals as a result of pipsissewa is endangered in a number of states (like Maine), and is taken into account extirpated in elements of its vary.
Beneath the tall bushes we comply with a path brushed by ferns. Beneath out toes is a hidden world of fungal dialog with tree roots. Quickly, we start to see the now-familiar companions of the mushrooms we’re searching. Vegetation, but blanched and alien, they resemble fungi greater than something leafy. They comprise no chlorophyll; as an alternative, they’re mycoheterotrophs, poaching their vitamin from their mycorrhizal neighbors. These pale denizens of the leaf litter can develop in deep shade, counting on the photosynthesizing bushes and the fungal companions that act as important couriers.
