Medicinal mushrooms are continually grabbing the spotlight for their incredible health benefits, ranging from cancer prevention and treatment, to being anti-viral, to curing asthma and even prolonging life. Type in any of the medicinal mushrooms listed below into a PubMed database and you’ll see countless scientific studies validating their use as medicine. But while science […]
As summer nights lengthen into autumn, the forests of the Catskill mountains in upstate New York fill with magical, mystical, medicinal, and edible wild mushrooms. “Toadstool” is a quaint name for the many mushrooms that spring forth between rains, while “fungi” is the more technical term. Fungi are plants, but plants without flowers, or roots, […]
I was on the first week of my field biology job in the mountains of North Cascades National Park when I got a message from the trees. I had been doing Wilderness Awareness School’s naturalist training series for a few years, but it still took me by surprise to hear trees talking. Or maybe it […]
One of my housemates brought home a big mushroom for the dinner table. I sniffed at it suspiciously, nervous about the edibility of an unknown (to me) fungus. A friend came in and buried her face in the plate-sized cap. “It smells like…” she searched for the term. “A beautiful woman’s hair,” she claimed decisively, […]