A day spent hunting mushrooms in Central Park with the New York Mycological Society
“The good news,” said Gary Lincoff, “is that there are only a few deadly mushrooms in Central Park. You’re more than welcome to experiment, and we’d love to write up your obit in our newsletter.”
He was speaking to a group of twenty-five members of the New York Mycological Society, before they embarked on the first Central Park mushroom hunt of the season. Make that twenty-six, including me, and twenty-seven including my girlfriend, who let me drag her there. We’d gathered at ten in the morning at 96th and Central Park West, toting baskets (though Lincoff recommended Citarella bags and old egg cartons, because “there are rangers who don’t understand what we’re doing”), loupes, DLSRs, and knives with tiny brushes attached on the end. In the quiet mist, it was easy to forget we were in the middle of Manhattan, where there seems little room for ecological mystery.
The once-defunct Society was reinstated in 1962 by the avant-garde composer John Cage, who was fanatical about mushrooms. Cage taught classes about them, wrote poetry about them, and won an Italian game show about them. According to Kenneth Silverman’s 2010 biography of Cage, Begin Again, he also ran into plenty of mushroom-hunter trouble: rousing angry yellow jackets, poisoning himself, and getting lost, once prompting a search party of fifty people and a helicopter. In his book For the Birds (1981), Cage wrote, “It is useless to pretend to know mushrooms. They escape your erudition.”
Lincoff’s pre-hunt pep talk also emphasized the elusiveness of mushrooms. “There are more mushrooms in Central Park than there are trees,” he said. “There’s a different weather pattern every year, and new ones all the time.” Lincoff authored the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms and was, according to several hunters, their reason for attending the walk. His detailed website examines fungi from every angle imaginable, with a section for “Mushroom Plays and Songs” (“I am the very model of an amateur mycologist”).
We set off, which meant a lot of kneeling on the dewy ground and looking through magnifying glasses. The members present ranged in age from twenties to eighties, including several PhD students, a Feldenkrais practitioner, a programmer, a sculptor’s assistant, and a psychology professor.
Near the tennis courts, we found a line of large white mushrooms. Lincoff explained that these were part of a giant fairy ring — a natural formation — that grows larger each year. “They dug up the area and planted the trees, but it didn’t matter—the mushrooms were underneath,” Lincoff said, smiling. In Van Cortlandt Park, a member of the society recently discovered twenty interlacing fairy rings.