Mad for Mushrooms

THREE YEARS AGO, MEG MADDEN KNEW LITTLE ABOUT MUSHROOMS. THANKS TO A HOBBY SHE PICKED UP DURING THE PANDEMIC, SHE JUST PUBLISHED A BOOK AND IS HELPING DEVELOP VERMONT’S FIRST STATEWIDE CATALOG OF MUSHROOMS.

BY ELSIE PARINI AND LISA LYNN | PHOTOS BY MEG MADDEN

Growing up here in Middlebury, I would always run out into the woods. I walk a lot more slowly now,” says Meg Madden.

It’s spring and during a walk in Wright Park, Madden, 49, stops numerous times. She kneels down next to a tree trunk that is riddled with the small fungi. On another side of the trunk, she points out a brittle pheasant back mushroom. “That’s from last year,” she notes.

When the pandemic locked everything down in March 2020, Madden and her daughter (then age 9) started going on walks into Battell Woods behind their house in Middlebury.

“We got to see the entire forest wake up, species by species,” said Madden, an artist and jewelry designer. “I was out there every day.”

What did they find? Mushrooms.

“At first I was terrified to even touch the mushrooms,” she says. “I grew up like many people do, being somewhat afraid of mushrooms. My parents weren’t foragers and I didn’t even dare eat a mushroom I found, even if I was 100% sure of what it was,” she said.

“It took me about a year to try my first foraged chanterelle,” she says. She now has favorite stashes of chanterelles and other edible species. “Never ask a forager where their stashes are,” though, she says with a laugh.

Beyond Beauty

What drew Madden in was the beauty of mushrooms. “They are the fruiting bodies or reproductive structures of fungi,” she notes. “The scarlet elf cup was my gateway mushroom,” she remembers. “My daughter pointed them out and I couldn’t believe they were so such a rich color of red.”

Madden started posting photos of mushrooms to Instagram along with short descriptions. “All of a sudden my feed started getting a lot of interest,” she says. By December 2020 she had about 1,000 followers.

Just four months later she was on her way to 10,000 followers. Her Instagram, @megmaddendesign, as of April 2023 now has nearly 50,000 followers.

Madden’s curiosity quickly became more than skin-deep.

“I’m such a nerd,” says Madden, who has also worked as a mosquito biologist. “I became fascinated with fungi,” she says. She now gives talks, leads mushroom walks and talks and in March 2023, Madden published This Is A Book For People Who Love Mushrooms, an illustrated introduction to mushrooms that even her daughter could appreciate

“It’s not like I can go out, find mushrooms and not then try to learn everything about them. I can’t believe the amount of diversity you can find here. People think brown and white when they think about mushrooms, but

I’ve seen mushrooms in every color in our woods,” she says.

As we walk, she points to a broken stick on the trail that has a teal tinge to it, like it has been dipped in a stain. We kneel down and under the magnification of an iPhone, she points to tiny green elf cups that have colonized the broken edges of the wood.

A MUSHROOMING SCIENCE

Madden has an iNaturalist.com account (myco_mama_vt) and in January 2022 started the Fungi of Vermont page on that website — a place where anyone can post their findings. Since then, nearly 2,000 people have identified more than 1,300 macro fungi. Madden herself is responsible for 318 ids, including several that only have a few observations listed in New England, such as the purple edged lute and a ballerina waxcap.

Madden’s work has caught the eye of people who are drawn by more than the beauty of her images.

Suzanne Gifford who has been leading the Green Mountain National

Forest’s Long-term Ecosystem Monitoring Project, a 50-year project that is hoping to inventory forest species and monitor the impacts of climate, soil health, air and water quality, noted the quality and depth of Madden’s work in both photographing and documenting fungi.

“Meg has really helped out with our BioBlitzes,” she says, referring to the events where citizens help identify species in their areas. “When it comes to fungi, we have so little solid data about what’s here, it’s really helpful to have folks out in the field helping to identify what they see.

Everett Marshall, a biologist with the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife, invited Madden to be part of a special advisory group for fungi for the Endangered Species Committee for Vermont.

“With mushrooms, it’s hard to know if something is threatened or endangered or if it’s just underobserved because there aren’t a lot of people working to catalog species,” Madden says. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that mushrooms are dependent on both weather (they like rain and moisture) and timing. “They don’t come up every year or even in the same place. It takes a lot of energy for a fungus to make a mushroom,” she says.

“Only 5% of the earth’s fungal species are known to humans,” Madden notes in her book. “Fungi are an important part of the ecosystem we are just starting to really understand and appreciate,” she says.

“It’s pretty exciting because mycology is still a relatively new field,” she notes. “Fungi were just lumped in with plants until the 1960s. For instance, one edible mushroom that is fairly common in Vermont, Bear’s Head Tooth, was only officially described to science in 1984.

THE ROLES OF FUNGI

Madden also points out some of the roles mushrooms play in forest ecology. “Saprotrophic mushrooms help wood decay. Without them trees that have died would still be here,” she says. Common examples of this type include oyster mushrooms, turkey tails and shiitake.

Mycorrhizal mushrooms, such as chanterelles, have beneficial relationships with host trees or other plants, acting as an extension of the root system and helping them access water and nutrients.

Parasitic mushrooms such as chaga or honey fungi feed off a host tree (or even insects or animals) and can eventually kill the host.

Madden also points to the medicinal value of mushrooms. “So many of our modern medicines, including penicillin, come from mushrooms,” she notes. “I often take lion’s mane in supplement form to help with nerve damage.”

Madden is careful to not offer positive identifications or to answer when people ask her if a mushroom is edible or not. “There’s too much liability,” she says. She cautions foragers: “We have some common mushrooms here that could either make you sick or kill you with one bite.”

Instead of focusing on the foraging, Madden has chosen to educate instead. “Part of my mission is to connect folks with nature in a meaningful way. If people have an increased awareness of their surroundings, then they’re more likely to be respectful and take care of their environment,” she says.

A Mushroom Primer

Meg Madden’s new book, This Is A Book For People Who Love Mushrooms, $16, is a great beginner’s guide to mushrooms. This pocketsized, 120-page hardback was published by Running Press in March 2023 and includes a fascinating layman’s introduction to mushrooms followed by illustrated profiles of some of the most commonly seen species. The book also includes a chapter on foraging and describes popular edible varieties such as black trumpet or hen of the woods, their fruiting season, habitat and ecology.