Wild Ideas: Moving to an enchanted land of shrooms

I’m writing this column from the far side of Shenandoah Valley. I recently moved here after a friend and I had searched for more than two years in a depressingly competitive real- estate market for a house she could buy and we could share.

My friend loves exotic breeds of chickens and has a small, mixed flock of them. She was keen on getting a farmette with at least five acres. After living on forested mountains for most of my 22 years in Rappahannock County, easily navigated, rolling hills and fields with new species to observe sounded good to me, too. But after facing climbing prices, bidding wars, and deal- breaking issues with specific properties, we ended up in a quirky house with outbuildings on about 3.5 heavily wooded acres on the top of a steep hill a few miles west of Mount Jackson. Chickens are thought to have been domesticated from Asian red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), and my friend hopes hers, which haven’t been moved here yet, can successfully return to their wild forest roots.

The previous owner of the property, whose main home was in Arlington until he passed away early this year, named it Red Gap. I think the name came from the 1935 film “Ruggles of Red Gap,” a fish- out- ofwater story about an English butler who was lost in a poker game by his employer and ends up in on a ranch in the American West.

The ecology here is mostly mixed deciduous forest, with a good dose of pines and hemlock, garnished on the edges with Japanese trees and shrubs, a passion of the previous owner. When my friend and I first checked out the property, in June, the many mature native rhododendrons planted around the

edge of the forest were gloriously in bloom, reminding me of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

But since we’ve moved in, high heat and humidity, along with continual torrential rains, has turned the forest into more of a tropical jungle. It’s dark enough that the only flower I’ve found blooming in its interior is the aptly named ghostpipe ( aka Indian pipe), a strange little translucent wildflower that grows in small clusters in deep shade.

Fungi also like the damp, dark environment. They come in various

sizes and shapes, from parasol mushrooms with 6-inch caps to tiny mushrooms with caps barely a quarter inch across. Most are almost as pale as the ghostpipe. I’m still trying to identify many of the gilled and polypore mushrooms, including various inkcap and mycena species. Bracket (aka shelf) mushrooms have also sprouted from many of the rotting stumps and logs.

A large, white cauliflower mushroom, in the Sparassis (coral mushroom) suddenly grew up in and around introduced liriope in the last couple of days, as did a coral- mushroom lookalike, the fetid false coral, which is brown with white tips. The only colorful mushroom that I’ve seen here

PHOTOS BY PAM OWEN Dampness at Red Gap has contributed to the many hues of this bracket mushroom that is consuming a rotting stump. Right, Ghostpipe is the only wildflower found blooming this time of year in the dark forest at Red Gap. Bottom right, Many mushroom species intermingle in the dim forest light at Red Gap. Bottom laft,this large cauliflower mushroom, in the coralmushroom family, is growing in and around liriope, an introduced plant.