Fungi - Fascinating Friend or Foe

Firefly Books released a 2010 revised edition of "Mushrooms and Other Fungi of North America" by Roger Phillips. Any mycologists on your list? Online booksellers have it for under $15.

Mushrooms and Other Fungi of N.A. is well researched and thoroughly illustrated with over 1,000 studio photos, so you can figure out what that is growing in your yard, at the park, or campsite. Don't go exploring without it!

Each picture includes stages of growth, growth info, where you can find it and whether or not you should use it in the kitchen. Included are descriptions of the cap anatomy, stem, and spores.

AND MORE from the weird and wonderful world of fungi

The Harvard University Botany site has a link to The Life and Works of Theodor Holmskjold. It includes "Beata Ruris Otia Fungis Danicis Impensa, or Happy Resting Periods in the Country Studying Danish Fungi". Take an hour out of whatever else you have to do and browse here.

from the site - "The stunningly rendered, impeccably accurate, and beautiful illustrations of each of the seventy four specimens in the two-volume work led Swedish botanist Anton Jahan Retzius (1742-1821) to call it “the most brilliant work which had appeared up to that time”. C.H. Persoon (1755-1837), the father of systematic mycology and himself an author of texts on some of the same fungi included in Beata, considered the work of great value and the illustrations the most beautiful he had seen (Lind 1913)".