Growing up in the Central Highlands of Tasmania, foraging for wild mushrooms was a regular part of life. Now living in Canberra, a landscape markedly similar to where I grew up, mushrooms have an altogether more deadly reputation. However, it all comes down to specialist knowledge about the subject, as I discovered on a chilly evening with one of Canberra’s mushrooming experts.
Life in the national capital is always interesting. Recently, as the days began to cool, I was reminded of my childhood in the central wilds of Tasmania. It was in a landscape much like here, when we roamed the endless paddocks on the hunt for mushrooms, though there were only two kinds of fungi on our horizon – mushrooms and toadstools.
Topical gatherings around fascinating topics
Following in the French tradition of topical gatherings around fascinating topics, I attended an evening called Cafe Champignon. Fungologist Alison Pouliot, formerly of the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society brought fungi into a local lounge room near me. As the invitation to the evening noted ‘in a welcome reminder that the world is definitely becoming more fungal and less viral.’ It was a fine thing to do on a chilly Canberra night.
Life in the national capital is always interesting. Recently, as the days began to cool, I was reminded of my childhood in the central wilds of Tasmania. It was in a landscape much like here, when we roamed the endless paddocks on the hunt for mushrooms, though there were only two kinds of fungi on our horizon – mushrooms and toadstools.
Topical gatherings around fascinating topics
Following in the French tradition of topical gatherings around fascinating topics, I attended an evening called Cafe Champignon. Fungologist Alison Pouliot, formerly of the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society brought fungi into a local lounge room near me. As the invitation to the evening noted ‘in a welcome reminder that the world is definitely becoming more fungal and less viral.’ It was a fine thing to do on a chilly Canberra night.
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| In search of wild mushrooms - how not to poison yourself |
Alison’s new book (co-authored with Dr Tom May, a Senior Research Scientist in Mycology at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria) is ‘Wild mushrooming: a guide for foragers’. She read tantalising snippets from this and from her previous book, ‘The allure of fungi’, and answered some of the big questions – which fungi are delectable? Which are deadly? How do we differentiate them? Why does Canberra have the gruesome repute as the deathcap capital? And even, how can fungi give us new ways of thinking about the living world? It’s clearly a very popular subject and Alison has had some appreciative coverage in assorted media.
