The fungi I found were probably almost a year old, but these mushrooms were on my mind because a fungus-lover friend who had harvested basketfuls last June was, in these stressful times, building some community by offering them to everyone she knew. Shelf fungi, bracket fungi and conks are all in this group. They are polypores, a group that can be distinguished from gilled mushrooms by the tubes on the underside of the mushroom in which the spores are produced. These mushrooms are commonly called hemlock varnish shelf mushrooms (scientific name is Ganoderma tsugae) because they grow on hemlocks and have a distinct shiny, varnished appearance on the upper surface. So, in this hemlocky wonderland I stumbled upon (literally) huge shiny red shelf fungi, some wrapped around fallen hemlock trunks, some sticking up from a stalk.

Large pillows and cradles can be observed almost a millennium after the event that dropped the trees.” What I found so amazing in Tom’s description was his mention that these pits and mounds of earth that I was stumbling through could have originated 1,000 years ago! As the tipped-up roots decay they drop the earth they excavated, creating a mound or pillow adjacent to the cradle. This lumpy forest terrain is caused by live trees that are toppled by wind or snow, “their roots rip out of the ground, excavating a pit or cradle. The ground is very lumpy here, a great example of something I recently read about in Tom Wessell’s “Forest Forensics.”

This was a beautiful shady woods with giant old hemlocks towering overhead and massive rotting stumps and huge fallen trees - both trunk and root mass slowly crumbling with decay into the forest floor. I recently found a striking red shelf fungus while walking through a hemlock grove near my house.

Target red shelf