Colourful fungi
COLOURFUL and interesting mushrooms, toadstools, and other fungal fruit bodies are now abundant throughout
Otago. Conspicuous beneath pine trees are brown boletes and fly agarics, the latter red with white spots.
The brown bolete Suillus
luteis, sticky bun or slippery jack, is a common introduced species that has a mycorrhizal association with the roots of pine trees. (A mycorrrhiza is a fungus which grows in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic or mildly pathogenic relationship.) The cap varies from pale brown to dark reddish brown. The flesh of the cap peels to show a pale yellow flesh. The underside of the cap is pale buff. It lacks gills, having instead many hundreds of tiny pores for the spores to fall through — these tiny holes being a characteristic of boletes. This species is edible.
The fly agaric Amanita
muscaria, its cap red with white spots, is deadly poisonous. An introduced species, it too has a mycorrhizal association with the roots of pine trees, English beech, and also native beech trees. It is called ‘‘the fly agaric’’ because people once made a poison bait for flies by mashing the cap and mixing it with milk and/or sugar. It is the archetypal pixie/goblin toadstool.
At one time, an academically very bright student worked with me over the university vacation. To my horror, I found he’d eaten fly agaric. He and his two university student flatmates collected some fly agarics and grilled them on their electric stove. My helper drank the black liquid that accumulated beneath the toadstools in the pan below the griller. Eventually becoming delusional, the tall young man strode down George St under the shop verandas, spat in pedestrians’ eyes and informed them that he had baptised them in the name of the prophet. Luckily he recovered in two weeks, although it could have been fatal. This is the only case I know of someone in New Zealand eating this fungus. It was an incredibly risky and unwise thing to do.
It is best to avoid eating all mushrooms and toadstools if they cannot be accurately identified. However, there should be no difficulty with the edible little pink mushroom, field mushroom and horse mushroom, all found commonly in farm paddocks, all of which we used to collect, fry, and eat as children.