by By George Barron
Lone Pine Publishing, 1999
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.