Wild Plants and Wooly Bears: September 2011

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Here in my basket are some late-summer mushrooms. The yellow ones are chanterelles and the black ones are black trumpets. Both came from my woodlot. The chanterelles were in a section of mixed hardwood/softwood and the black trumpets came from a large colony growing along and also in, a tote road.

The mushrooms in the photo below are spreading hydnums and are easily identified by the thick stem and distinctive whitish-orange (I liken this to the color of a Cremesicle that I ate as a kid) color of the cap.

But the most distinctive feature of the hydnum mushroom is the spiny-looking projections on the bottom of the cap. These were likened to teeth by whomever gave this mushroom its scientific name of Dentinum remandum.

Of course there are many other easily identified mushrooms around now, but these are probably the choicest, at least in my opinion.

By the way, I'm giving two talks on foraging this coming Saturday, October 1, 2011. These are at two locations in Brunswick. For more info on this, go to www.justwrite.com.

About Tom Seymour

Besides writing freelance pieces for a number of magazines, I am also a regular columnist and feature writer for The Maine Sportsman Magazine, New England’s largest circulation outdoor magazine. Additionally, I am a regular contributor to Fisherman’s Voice Magazine, specializing in maritime history and human-interest stories. Finally, I write several columns for Courier Publication newspapers, including a home-and-garden column called From The Ground Up.

My book credits include Wild Plants of Maine, A Useful Guide, Hidden World Revealed, Musings of A Maine Naturalist and Tom Seymour's Forager's Notebook, all by Just Write Books, Topsham, Maine. I also wrote Foraging New England, Fishing Maine, Hiking Maine, Off The Beaten Path, Maine, Birding Maine and Nuts & Berries of New England, all for Globe Pequot Press. The Maine Sportsman has published a collection of my wildlife columns in book form as an inducement to subscribers. Finally, Tom Seymour's Maine, A Maine Anthology, iUniverse Press, is a collection of Maine history and folklore.

Foraging for wild plants is my great passion and these figure largely in my diet. I live in a small cottage that sits well off the road on 10 acres of land in Waldo, Maine.