Every year, when autumn begins to sigh, —her chill breath cast down from spare, alpine shelf or up from briny sea cave, as she waits to weave the clouds about her and tiptoe over the valley, to finally stretch herself out again over the land, I begin to dream of mushrooms. My mind returns to those secret hollows, shadowed by Douglas firs and lit from below by the luminescence of maples turning, where my fingers whisper away the needle-and-leaf duff, so sweetly smelling of ancient rot, to tease out the fragrant and fleshy fruits. They are both beautiful with their folds, their delicate gills or sponge, their colours (creamsicle orange, or ruddy, or all the elegant colours simply called off-white) but they are also wonderfully beastly. Perfect for this time of year when we celebrate the strange and dark, tails-side of the coin of the world.
I was fortunate to learn to gather mushrooms in childhood. And so, it has grown with me over the years to a seasonal rite. With my parents we gathered bucket loads of chanterelles from the dark forests, long-felled now by logging, but where my mind still returns this time of year to pick its way though the Oregon grape and sword fern. And in Spring we hoped for morels. I remember several times when the bramble-torn and muddy-kneed band of children that I ran about the countryside with came upon a patch of morels, these magical little cities popped-up overnight, and we stopped to fill our shirts-turned-knapsacks with the gnome treasure, hurrying back to the nearest house to deliver our gold! Pure magic.
Over the years, I’ve learned the habits and homes of other mushrooms: hedgehog, porcini, bearshead, oyster, matsutaki, black trumpet, shaggy mane. I have yet to taste shaggy mane, though just last weekend I walked a road absolutely cobbled in them. There is something so beautifully sinister about their transformation, that plump, white maiden dissolving into something dark, liminal and far more interesting.
Mushrooms crop-up often in my work. As they do and have done for so many artists and storytellers. There is something about them both earthy and rooted but also magical and otherworldly. Just the fact that their fruiting is when all else is dying captivates the imagination.
And so, to celebrate them, I offer you this collection of mushrooms to be printed and strung up like a garland. This is a gift, and I ask that you treat it as one. It is for personal use and not any kind of commercial reproduction.
