'Shroom boom

Soggy summer made ground fertile for a fungi explosion

Hana Mariah Hatta found her mushrooms in Little Rock’s MacArthur Park outside the Arkansas Arts Center.
Hana Mariah Hatta found her mushrooms in Little Rock’s MacArthur Park outside the Arkansas Arts Center.

Summer's monsoon bred a bumper crop of mushroom photos.

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Ed Figarsky and his dog Prim found this mushroom at Woodlands Edge in west Little Rock.

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John C. Nash of Little Rock found these morels a few miles north of Hector in the Ouachita National Forest.

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Johnnie Farris of Sherwood shot these “Caesar’s mushrooms” at Petit Jean State Park.

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Donita Davis walks the Ouachita Mountains regularly. “The rain this year has made it an extra good year for mushrooms,” she says.

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Charles Farris was hiking the Hemmed in Hollow Trail in Newton County when he stopped to take this photo.

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Jay Justice co-founded the Arkansas Mycological Society. He shot these “black chanterelles” (Craterellus fallax) in Faulkner County. Mycology is the study of fungi.

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Indigo milk caps (Lactarius indigo) “bleed” blue fluid when cut. Jay Justice found these in Perry County.

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Doug Siemans spotted these outside his home in Siloam Springs, as he was getting into his car to go to work. “They were only about 2 inches tall,” he says.

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Kathy Collier pursues fungi photography around her home in Winslow with “a near single-minded passion on the 10 acres that I call home.” She’s presenting a class on photography at Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in September.

No sooner had Style asked readers to share their snaps than 'shroom, toadstool and "whatever" fungus began popping up in our email mailbox -- almost 1,000.

Those cute, blazing-red buttons that open into the yellow-and-red parasols? Not rare. And shelf-like arcs in astonishingly lovely hues are clinging to a lot of trees. But also, way too many yards appear to harbor disturbing piles of uncooked biscuits. Yuck!

Cheers to the humor of participants like Elaine Wootten of Little Rock, who sent a photo too blurry to use along with a comment too good not to: "When I first saw these, I thought my husband was growing his own golf balls!"

Another tip of the cap to "Cindy" whose email subject line promised "Shroom same size as an oak tree" and delivered exactly that: a little reddish-brown mushroom next to a seedling with four leaves.

Thank you, everyone! All you guys are fun.

-- Celia Storey

Style on 09/13/2016

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