Pat Mitchell has always loved hiking in the woods – spotting plants and animals others might miss, but lately he’s developed a passion for fungi and the mushrooms they produce.
“Imagine if this was an apple tree, and there were apples growing on it. Mushrooms are the apples. Fungi is the tree,” he explains
Seven years ago, he and a friend founded the Blue Ridge Mycological Society— a group dedicated to the study of this life form.
“We teach people how to identify them, which ones are edible. We’ll have mushroom cultivation workshops. We also do a basket-weaving class every year. Mushroom baskets are a big thing if you come to mushroom events, and we get together at this farm, camp out and hang around the fire and make up goofy lyrics to these songs. So we do all sorts of weird stuff. We’re mushroom people. We’re nerds."
In addition to singing the praises of mushrooms with musicians like Tyler Sjostrom and Isaac Hopkins, club members support the science of mycology.
“We have over a million species of fungi, and there are about 300 people in this country who are working with fungi. There’s not a lot of people doing the work, so there’s a big need for community science – taking pictures of things. Posting on apps like iNaturalist or Mushroom Observer which feeds into a database and shows where things are growing and actually sending things in to be analyzed and sequenced and be house in herbariums or fungariums is really important work.”
Fungi might, for example, have life-saving properties, but as land is developed, we may miss out.
“As we are destroying habitat, we’re destroying things that we don’t even know that they’re there. There are a lot of pharmaceuticals and medicines that come from the world of fungi, and so, yeah, it’s scary to think that the answers to some things could be disappearing, and we would never even know.”
And, he says, this part of the world is the perfect place to keep looking.
“The Appalachian Mountains are really old, and we have a very rich biodiversity of tree species and plant species and so that translates to an incredible diversity of fungi, and it’s poorly studied. It’s kind of the wild west. There are a lot of things we don’t know about fungi.”
One thing we do know is that many forms of fungi look different when viewed at night, under ultra-violet light. Brown or beige turns day-glo yeallow, green, orange, pink or blue.
“So right here you see there’s a couple of different species of lichen. Now watch what happens when I hit this one particular species-- see that turn yellow? Wow! That’s amazing.”
In addition to fascinating Mitchell and his friends, fungi feed a range of animals—from moose, bear and deer to turtles, squirrels and insects of all kinds.
“And then there are also mushroom-eating mushrooms. You know there are some mushrooms that parasite other mushrooms, and then there are ants that farm mushrooms. There are species of mushrooms that only live within certain ant mounds.”
And, of course, people enjoy eating them. But Mitchell warns there are 41 toxic varieties in Virginia, so you have to know what you’re picking and when to look.
On Saturday night, from 7-9, he’ll lead a hike through the Quarry Gardens at Schuyler to reveal fluorescent mushrooms and lichens, and on Sunday the Blue Ridge Mycological Society will meet there from 2-5. Mitchell says as many as 200 members come from as far away as North Carolina. But in the spirit of mushroom loving everywhere, his club’s website has contact information for the New River Valley and West Virginia Mushroom Clubs, the Central Appalachian Mycological Society and the Mycological Association of Washington, D.C.
