Like hundreds of other people, perhaps even two hundred people, I have spent years being baffled by the microscopy notes and photographs in mushroom identification guidebooks and experts’ websites. Example: “Spores 6–9 x 4–5 µm after the collapse of the hyaline vesicular appendix; more or less ellipsoid, with a truncated end; appearing double-walled, with a series of ‘pillars’ between the walls; finely stippled; inamyloid; brown in KOH.”
I can gloss a few formulaic Egyptian hieroglyphs1; I have injected DNA into fish embryos under a microscope; but spore microscopy was Greek to me. That changed when I attended a workshop a little over a month ago.
The entirely self-taught teacher, besides showing me the difference between Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes, also handed me a paper packet of chanterelles because I’d accidentally shown up early and helped set up, and also because I hadn’t gotten any chanterelles of my own. (I candied them when I could and later put them in a cheesecake2 for Thanksgiving.)
(Incidentally, cheesecakes are hell and require, at minimum, two days to make, if one wishes to remain sane and not wind up gazing into the abyssal eyes of Nyarlathotep3.)
(I didn’t know that then.)
At any rate, mushrooms, like any other kingdom, are divided into a number of phyla, the two largest being Ascomycota and Basidiomycota. If it’s easier, think of them as “A” and “B.”
Ascomycetes include yeast for bread and beer, Penicillium, ergot, cup fungi, truffles, morels, Dutch elm disease, and the fungal half of a majority of lichens (which are themselves a symbiosis of fungi and algae). They are the weird kids, the misfits, the Goths and patchouli-scented, those alarmingly focused on skateboard tricks, or tree species of North America, or mushrooms, or fencing.
Basidiomycetes are the phylum we think of when we think of mushrooms. Gilled cap? Stem? Basidiomycete. This group also contains chanterelles, boletes, polypores of all kinds, jellies, puffballs, plant pathogens like rusts and smuts, some other yeasts, and the horrifying stinkhorns.
Askos is wine-skin in Greek, while basidium is an odd combination of Latin basis with Greek diminutive idion (like French -ette, Italian -ino, English -kin and -ling) formation meaning “little basis.” Both names relate to how the spores are stored; the ascomycetes carry theirs usually eight to a long thin sac, while basidiomycetes’ spores are attached by a very fragile stalk to a pillar-like basidium.
These are crush mount slides I made with a minuscule grain of material sandwiched between glass in a drop of 3% KOH solution4. The first is from a beautiful orange cup fungus, the second from a waxy gray Pluteus, species undetermined. (Photos were taken with a very cheap phone.) You can count the eight spores in the asci yourself:
I was startled when I first looked through the eyepiece at a lower magnification; I thought I was looking at a shining handful of wheat. I have heard another mycologist describe Aleuria aurantica as one of the most beautiful mushrooms, and its macroscopic fruiting body is indeed glorious, but this was another face altogether.
I think the eyepiece reticle is marked in micrometers, so the ascospores are approximately 12 x 5 µm.
The next slide is from what is called a viaduct section, which is a slice shaved very carefully across three gills pressed against one’s thumb, using a razor blade. The spores are spherical, about 3-4 µm across. The basidia are the short, stubby, blurry structures along the upper edge, which apparently have four spores lightly attached to each, up top—I couldn’t count these clearly, as they’re three-dimensional, and the microscope only allows for two-dimensional slices as we adjust the stage up and down. The tall pillarlike cells are cystidia, sterile and mysterious and lovely.
We spent the afternoon making slides out of gelatinous corals and slimy Suillus and the teeth of a violet hedgehog. By the end of it, I could tell you the difference between Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, and more to the point, how strange and beautiful their spores and cystidia are.
In the months since the workshop, I’ve read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss (which also features crush mount slides), giving names to mosses I’ve touched and admired, as well as Braiding Sweetgrass, and the anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis—all excellent books that put the breath back in me. Little by little, some are remembering.
To look on a lovely, familiar face one morning and see a new and strange and richer beauty beneath it; to know and see and name the beauty around us, from Dendroalsia to violet hedgehogs, as well as the rich gifts given, of blue dye and Suillus duxelles5 and bedding and shelter; and to give thanks for all of it—this is our oldest way of being human. It is synonymous with love.
News
On Fragile Waves has been chosen for Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2021, Best of 2021 Booklist Editors' Choice: Adult Titles, NYT’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2021, NPR’s 2021 Books We Love, and The Washington Independent Review of Books’ 51 Favorite Books of 2021. I am thankful to the reviewers and librarians who cared for the book; it would have vanished otherwise.
“Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire,” originally published in 2017 in the print anthology New Suns, ed. Nisi Shawl, was reprinted by Lightspeed in their December issue and is freely available online starting today.
Two weeks ago, the sixteen people supporting this newsletter (thank you all, and welcome to the seventeenth) got a very long
rantdisquisition on everything from Van Gogh to Audre Lorde to H.L. Mencken and the Comstock Laws, with Gillette razors and a very long footnote from the American Pediatric Association thrown in. It was delayed by the amount of reading I had to do for it, and I appreciate your patience. (Also, I’m proud of it.) Typos and errors have since been fixed.P.S. — am at Worldcon in D.C.
With candy caps in the crust. From Chad Hyatt’s The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen (San Jose, CA: Chestnut Fed Books, 2018).
Who, since Lovecraft describes him as resembling a Pharaoh, is probably a big duck + small circle.
You could do it in plain water as well, but KOH solution has some preferable properties.
Also from Chad Hyatt’s cookbook.
Fixed moss species name and link to Worldcon schedule. You'd think I'd have learned by now not to post early in the morning.