Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu
The joys of mushroom-hunting, the earthiest, most primordial form of foraging, are lyrically evoked in Colin Thubron’s Among the Russians (1983).
On the outskirts of a forest near the Moscow-minsk highway, he falls into conversation with a young doctor.
‘I wish I could express it,’ the doctor tells him. ‘You know instinctively if the conditions are right. You can sense the thrill of it. So you go forward into a light clearing, perhaps – and there they are!’
The doctor then elaborates on his favourites: delicate, pleated ink-caps with their umbrella hats; strong-tasting red-birch boletas; yellow chanterelles growing in huddles together; and small, dense clumps of honey-coloured armillarias – best consumed, he insists, with a slug of vodka.
Despite this profusion of forms, colours and aromas, the magical enigma of the mushroom is that each of the thousands of species has the same absurdly simple structure – no more than a mass of tangled, interwoven filaments, or hyphae, readily discerned with a magnifying glass.
Those hyphae arise from a vast, subterranean network, stretching out in all directions.
This network, the mycelium, is the body, as it were, of the fungal organism. The mushroom is its spore-bearing fruit – as if a vine were buried underground and all that could be seen were its bunches of grapes projecting upwards.
Those forest mushrooms are virtually the only evidence, to human eyes, of those ancient, seemingly primitive forms of life that, concealed in their tens of billions below ground, make our Earth habitable.
‘The more we know about fungi,’ writes mycologist Merlin Sheldrake in his recently published, completely riveting Entangled Life, ‘the less makes sense without them.’
Their defining anatomical feature – the hyphae – are five times thinner than
The Oldie
a human hair. They grow ever longer as they tunnel through the soil foraging for minerals and nutrients.
The practicalities remain obscure, but a collection of minuscule vesicles at the hyphal tip – the Spitzenkörper – plays a vital role. These secrete powerful enzymes that break up the soil and absorb the nutrients that are released, manufacturing the components of the ever-elongating cell wall and slotting them in place.
Seemingly senseless, the hyphae can nonetheless detect subtleties of the composition and moisture of the soil.
Though also brainless, they integrate this flood of sensory information to determine the optimal direction for their growth. And so their communication and transport network expands ever outwards. They become, says Sheldrake, ‘a living labyrinth, by which much of the world is stitched into relations’.
The most consequential of the many attributes of fungi is their ability to form symbiotic, mutually beneficial associations with other forms of life.
Two billion or so years ago, when our planet was a most inhospitable place, they entered into a pact with single-cell bacteria to form lichens.
Together, these ‘pioneering organisms’ can flourish in extremes of heat and cold, colonising and feeding on barren rocks. The bacteria provide the energy for those hair-like hyphae to penetrate those hard, unforgiving surfaces. Lichens accelerate the process of weathering 50-fold or more, transforming rocks into potentially fertile soil. As Sheldrake writes, Tthe inanimate mass of mineral rock crosses over into the metabolic cycle of the living.’
So when, a mere 400 million years ago, the earliest plants made the transition from water to land, there was a receptive stratum into which they could establish themselves.
Once again, the fungi were there to make it happen, proliferating in and around their roots in the most important of all symbiotic relationships.
The leaves of plants, through the process of photosynthesis, abstract carbon dioxide from the air. Chemically transformed into sugars and lipids, it forms their tissues while also being the main source of energy for their fungal partners. Meanwhile, the fungi around their roots reciprocate by abstracting from the soil those vital elements of water, nitrogen and phosphorous necessary for the plants’ growth.
No one can tell how this mutually beneficial exchange is monitored so precisely. But without fungi, there would be no greenery – and no evolution of life on Earth.
Here, the Russian doctor’s forest mushrooms acquire an almost sacramental status as the sole, visible – and edible – evidence of that hidden kingdom of the fungi, without which we would not be here.