Mushrooms – pretty but not always safe

I have been fascinated with mushrooms for some time. Some are so bright and bold while others tend to blend in with their surroundings so well that it takes a good eye to spot one. As a child growing up in northern Indiana, one of my favorite family outings was to go mushroom hunting after a spring rain. We didn’t gather any and all mushrooms we saw, but we looked for two kinds only – morel mushrooms and what we called “gumps.” I can find the morels on Google and in my mushroom book, but not the gumps so it might have been a colloquial name. My hunch is that they are also in the morel family – they were more stem than cap.

A few days ago I spied a single mushroom in my yard and decided to take pictures and chronicle how it changed in appearance over the next few days. I had expected it to open out until it looked like a plate and eventually a bowl, as I had seen some mushrooms that did that a summer or two ago. Here are my first pictures:

I posted them on Facebook and an Indiana friend asked me if it could be a Shaggy Mane mushroom. I had never heard of a shaggy mane but my husband had. I looked it up and learned it was edible and tasty, but I was not brave enough to eat it on my first hunch. I resolved to continue photographing it over the next few days. Here are three more pictures all taken the same day. A few days have passed and this mushroom is shriveling up pretty fast. It is obviously not the kind that makes a bowl. The last picture shows mold where it is touching the grass. Yuck. I think I’m through taking pictures of this mushroom.

I still want to know if it was a Shaggy Main, and if it would have been an edible mushroom if I had picked it the first day I saw it. It is pretty intimidating to think about learning which mushrooms are edible and which are poisonous. I prefer to err on the side of caution.

Meanwhile there is another patch of mushrooms in a different part of the yard to wonder over. They don’t look quite as interesting as this one did, however.