Northern Woodlands

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Mushrooms of Northeast North America: Midwest to New England

Lone Pine’s entry into the regional mushroom literature is a solid performer, treating just over 600 species found in eastern Canada, the Great Lakes states, and New England. (It ought particularly to attract those beginning and intermediate mushroomers who were intimidated by the more scholarly approach – and perhaps the sheer weight! – of Alan E. Bessette’s more comprehensive Mushrooms of Northeastern North America.) It’s important to note that, like field guides to insects, no field guide to mushrooms is “complete.” Even David Arora’s Mushrooms Demystified, which is many an enthusiast’s bible and which features some 2,000 species, covers a mere selection. As Barron points out, mycology is a relatively young science; indeed, the well-known mycologist Alexander Smith believes that a full third of North American mushroom species are yet to be described and named. Faced with the larger and more difficult groups of gilled mushrooms – Cortinarius, Mycena, and Russula, for example – Barron confesses that most species will be unidentifiable absent microscopic work, and he therefore chooses to treat a small sample of common and reasonably distinctive species.

As all mushroom hunters know, the non-gilled varieties break down into easily recognizable groups: the sac fungi, the puffballs, the boletes, the polypores, the tooth fungi, and so on. The organizational challenge for mushroom books comes with the gilled mushrooms. Some guides divide these according to anatomical aspects (presence or absence of ring and/or cup, gills attached or free), some by dominant color, while others simply march bravely through the families and genera. Barron has chosen to divide the myriad gilled species into four groups according to spore color, which means that you’ll have to take a specimen home and do a spore print (which is easy and which you’ll often have to do to clinch an identification anyway) before you do much ID work – unless, of course, you simply want to leaf through the photographs.

And how are the photographs? With thankfully few exceptions (the photo featuring the spongy foot is a weird green, as if it were a still from a B movie about extraterrestrials), the photos are very nice. Barron has chosen to do naturalistic, in-habitat shots, which are at once more attractive and less informational than the plain-background, all-angles studio shots of, say, Roger Phillips’s Mushrooms of North America. George Barron has retired from a Canadian university, where he specialized in soil microfungi, so it shouldn’t surprise us that he particularly enjoys the challenge of photographing the smaller of the macrofungi, as witness the marvelous photos here of various slime molds. No mushroom field guide will be all things to all people, and some will regret the relative scarcity in this volume of under-cap shots (you’ll often have to rely on written descriptions of gills and pores), the lack of detailed gill-attachment information, the absence of season-of-fruiting information, and the lack of help with similar species (admittedly a trouble-fraught subject). But the species accounts are succinct and reliable, and the information in any one book can always be usefully complemented by that in one or more others.

Publishers of mushroom guides are always anxious lest agonizing deaths due to mushroom poisoning be laid to their doors, but even in this nervous climate, Barron is notably conservative on the matter of edibility. He declines to label as edible commonly eaten species such as orange jelly and dryad’s saddle. In a late section called “Mushrooms as Food,” he offers an illustrated list of 25 varieties that are at once excellent edibles and distinctive enough to be difficult to confuse with other species. Included are well-known mushrooms such as chanterelle, shaggy mane, giant puffball, oyster, king bolete, and the morels, as well as less generally appreciated dinner items such as pig’s ear and the gypsy. The idea is a sensible one: start with a few easy-to-identify (and delicious) mushrooms and gradually add to your list. This book will help novices get started while serving as an attractive additional reference for those already hooked.

Alan Pistorius

© 2006 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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For Love of Insects

Each of the 10 chapters in this book begins at a beginning, with the author discovering a new insect or other arthropod or a behavioral quirk of a previously known one. Then we are off, following Eisner, a renowned entomologist, usually accompanied by a graduate student or colleague, as he observes, collects, analyzes, and photographs the subject at hand. The creatures are brought into the lab – sometimes a makeshift lab in a motel room if he is traveling – and he describes in detail the methods that are used to figure out just what the creature is doing and how it is doing it.

The range of his investigations is wide, from using an electron microscope to examine the tarsal bristles of a beetle that clings to a palmetto leaf to considering broad ecological themes, noting often the evolution of new defensive strategies in insects to counter the ever-more-elaborate offenses of their predators.

Clearly, he admires the animals he studies. When he tries to pull 13.5-milligram, tarsal-bristled beetles from the leaves of their palmetto host, using a glue made of dental wax, a thin wire, a pulley, and a weight, the beetles hunker down and cling tenaciously, averaging 2 grams of adhesive strength. Eisner is obviously impressed: “Two grams amounts to 148 times their body mass. Think of it. In human equivalents – relative to a 155-pound human – this amounts to about 23,000 pounds, or 7.5 automobiles (Subaru Legacy station wagons, 1998 model).” And after the champion beetle clung with a mighty 240 times its body mass: “We celebrated that performance with a glass of wine.”

There are photographs of everything: the animal, its habitat, the lab equipment, and scanning electron microscope images of whatever bristles, hairs, or glands are being studied. Cameras seem to have recorded the progress of each investigation, every step of the way, and the images are both illuminating and beautiful. Charts and diagrams help out, too.

The book is set up to make life a breeze for its readers, which, for some of us, is essential as the subject matter is predominantly the chemicals that small animals use to defend themselves against predators. Instead of being intimidated, we are lured into believing that we might even be co-discoverers of such things as the ways that fireflies acquire defensive toxins called lucibufagins, or how beetles are physiologically equipped to aim a hot spray of benzoquinones directly at an attacker. The ubiquitous ant is frequently the enemy that other insects are seeking to chemically or behaviorally thwart, but Eisner also explores in detail the reasons that fish don’t eat whirligig beetles or why moths and green lacewings keep from getting caught in spider webs.

I didn’t like the title of this book, and consequently it stayed in our house unopened for several months. I’m glad I overcame my aversion, and though I still don’t like the title, there’s no doubt that Thomas Eisner does, indeed, love insects, and some of that is sure to rub off on anyone who reads his book.

Virginia Barlow

© 2006 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Literature of Place: Dwelling on the Land before Earth Day 1970

“With all the Web sites and links, with the near infinity of information available, who has time to – who wants to – read?” Melanie Simo poses this guilt-inducing question at the conclusion of Literature of Place. “Not simply ingest information,” she continues, “but read with undivided attention and penetration – who will do that?” This is perhaps the most insistent passage in an otherwise subdued book. Simo responds to her own challenge in this thoughtful, subtle exploration of an eclectic variety of writing about American landscapes in the years between 1890 and 1970. Her singular brand of literary archaeology unearths the essence of scores of “unaverage little books” by authors both renowned and forgotten, who depict many distinctive American places richly “layered
with human experience.”

Simo, the author of several books about landscape architecture and landscape history, hopes that her own deliberate excursions through “slow time” – the calm, temporal quality she discerns in the works of many place-oriented writers – will be useful to, among others, contemporary architects, planners, and landscape architects. “Legible, tangible connections between past, present, and future,” Simo observes, are also revealed not just by studying landscapes, buildings, and structures, but “through stories.”

In search of such stories, she has investigated a literary domain spanned by the “age of the typewriter,” as she designates it, which was “bracketed by an awareness of frontiers.” Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, had famously announced the recent abrupt closure of America’s western frontier. In April 1970, less than a year after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the first Earth Day represented an acknowledgment of the limits of the terrestrial sphere.

Simo organizes her expansive and imaginative reading journey symmetrically. The first half of her book selectively examines the literature of five American regions: New England, southern Appalachia, the Pacific coast, the desert West, and the agricultural heartland. The second half explores five “domains” or themes: places small, abandoned,
reinhabited, lost, and explored. Many of the authors Simo considers will be familiar to diligent readers and students of American literature. Wallace Stegner, William O. Douglas, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Jane Jacobs, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, Robert Frost, Edward Abbey, E. B. White, and Aldo Leopold appear in her gallery of place-centered authors. Many of these writers offer a truly cosmopolitan perspective, experiencing and writing about places that span the wilderness-rural-suburban-urban continuum. Indeed, Literature of Place is not a book about “nature writing”: Simo is interested in authors who evoke landscapes to which people belong, by virtue of work and play.

Her warmest sympathies and sharpest perceptions, however, are stimulated by writers of more modest reputation. Frank Bolles was an amateur naturalist who, during the 1890s, sensitively depicted the wilder niches of Boston’s far suburbs and the Sandwich Range of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Drama critic Walter Prichard Eaton, retreating to the country, investigated the cellar holes and upland pastures of the Berkshires. Maginel Wright Barney, sister of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, recalled pioneer life in a rural Wisconsin valley. The literary couple Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth applied their differing perspectives and literary talents to the same terrain along the coast of Maine. Wilderness advocate Harvey Broome, a man of “gentle, sensitive spirit,” rhapsodized in his published journals about the Great Smoky Mountains of his native east Tennessee.

While Simo’s own literary style has an appealingly old-fashioned economy and grace, there is nothing archaic or unsophisticated about either her perspective or her conclusions. “It is memory and history that concern us here,” she cautions, “not nostalgia as commonly understood and dismissed.” Her panoramic literary tour in the company of these sharp-eyed chroniclers of American landscape leads to an essential, hard-edged question about the future of that terrain and the human role in shaping it. The early years of the twenty-first century offer unsettling prospects of novel virtual landscapes, in which direct human contact with the surrounding environment is mediated by technology. Such a world seems distant from the slow-paced, deep-rooted, closely focused literature of genuine physical locales explored by Simo. The challenge for the future, she concludes, will be “how to balance the freedoms of mobility with a sense of responsibility for place.”

Larry Anderson

© 2006 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.