Introduction

My book Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain and Europe took five years to complete, during which time more than 25,000 specimens passed through my hands. Two years later, I decided to tackle North American mushrooms. As I thought I knew it all, I assured the publishers that I could produce a book containing 1,000 illustrations in five years. On the face of it, it should have been a piece of cake. But I forgot one thing — the sheer size of America. On my map it is only ten inches from Maine to Arizona, no farther than from London to Scotland, which I drive in a day and still have a few hours to collect; but looking for mushrooms in America is like searching the whole of Europe and then throwing in the Near East for good measure.

In August 1983 I duly set off with my family, my wife, Nicky, and our daughter, Phoebe, then only seven months old. Phoebe quickly learned to crawl in the woods along a county road near Bangor, Maine, where we were taken by Dick Homola on our first American outing at the Eighth Annual Northeastern Mycological Foray. It was a culture shock. Things are very different across the water; in Britain our annual mycological society foray is much more of an academic affair, Latin rather than English being the official language. However, we all changed gear and quickly (I hope) adapted to the lively and entertaining style of a weekend on an American campus.

The study of mushrooms in North America is both ahead and behind in comparison with mycology in Europe. Many excellent monographs of genera have been produced, almost all of them with Alexander H. Smith as co-author, a truly herculean volume of work demonstrating the enormous energy he must have put into his lifetime's study. More modern American monographs are available than monographs of European genera, but in Europe, on the other hand, there are three exceedingly good books dealing with the larger subject of the Agaric Flora in its entirety: Flore Analytique des Champignons Supérieurs by R. Kühner and H. Romagnesi, Keys to Agarics and Boleti by Meinhard Moser, and The New Check List of British Agarics and Boleti by R. W. G. Dennis, P. D. Orton, and F. B. Hora. This difference reflects the different state of knowledge on the two continents.

In Europe if something is found that cannot be named it creates a great deal of excitement, and the collection will rapidly be passed on to a mycologist who is an authority on that group so that it can be considered for classification and publication. In America if you find a mushroom that fails to fit any of the known species, its advent will be noted as: "Oh no, not another new species!" Alexander Smith has said that at least one-third of North American species are as yet undescribed. After traveling all over North America, from swamps to deserts to the high Rockies, and seeing the diversity of habitat and climate that have to be dealt with, I would be amazed if only that proportion remained to be described. This makes mycology in North America a most exciting subject; there is so much important and original work to be done in pushing forward the boundaries of science. To take just one group, the underground agarics that fail to rise and expand above the soil: in Europe such things are almost unknown, yet in America there are dozens of species near the West Coast, a most fascinating area of study.

How I tackled the book

This book is a collection of mushrooms that I have found or been lent by other collectors. Although it may seem an obvious thing to say, this approach makes the book very different from most general works, which are written to a list of mushrooms based on their recorded frequency. What happens when you work in my way is that the book represents the actual incidence of mushrooms in the wild. This can be seen by looking at the very large number of cortinarius and russula illustrated; both genera are exceedingly common across North America, with seven hundred and three hundred species respectively, but in practice they are often underrecorded on forays because of the difficulty of naming them. Though I believe my approach to be more realistically accurate, it can have its drawbacks: when I arrived in England after a three-month collecting trip with a tremendous preponderance of collections of these two genera, I then had to spend the next nine months struggling to come up with names. And this was the case with all the common genera. But, and this a big but, I have had the most tremendous amount of help from American mycologists, and I want to mention in particular Dr. Currie Marr, who painstakingly went through all my ramarias, and Rod Tulloss, who did the same for my amanita collections.

What is a mushroom?

A mushroom is only the reproductive part (known as the fruit body) of the fungus organism, which develops to form and distribute the spores.

Fungi are a very large class of organisms and have a structure that can be compared to plants; but they lack chlorophyll and are thus unable to build the carbon compounds essential to life. Instead, in the same way that animals do, they draw their sustenance ready-made from living or dead plants, or even animals.

A fungus begins as minute, hairlike filaments called hyphae. The hyphae develop into a fine, cobweblike net that spreads through the material from which the fungus obtains its nutrition. This net is known as the mycelium. Mycelium is extremely fine and in most cases cannot be seen without the aid of a microscope. In other cases, the hyphae bind together to make a thicker mat (tomentum), which can readily be observed. To produce a fruiting body, two mycelia of the same species band together in the equivalent of a sexual stage. Then if the conditions of nutrition, humidity, temperature, and light are met, a fruit body will be formed.

The larger fungi are divided into two distinct groups:

1. The spore droppers, Basidiomycetes (pp. l4-300). In this group the spores are developed on the outside of a series of specialized, club-shaped cells (basidia), which form on the gills, spines, tubes, or other spore-bearing surfaces. As they mature, they fall from the basidia and are normally distributed by wind. Most of the fungi in this book are of this kind, including the gilled agarics, the boletes, the polypores, and the jelly fungi.
2. The spore shooters, Ascomycetes, or "Ascos" (pp. 301-313). The spores in this group are formed within flask-shaped sacs (asci). When the spores have matured, they are shot out through the tips of the asci.
   The morels, cup fungi, and truffles are in this group.