Day 356: Easily the most recognizable mushroom in the world, featured in faerie tale books and video games, Amanita muscaria has a dangerous beauty. Like other Amanitas, it contains alkaloids which affect liver and kidney function, a warning which I'm sure some old hippies are now wishing they'd heeded instead of ingesting the mushroom in order to obtain its hallucinogenic effects. Best to appreciate this one where it stands, folks. It'll get you in the end. That said, muscaria is gorgeous, and I have seldom seen as textbook-perfect specimens as I found during an invasive-plant patrol yesterday. Typically, this "toadstool" has a bright red cap, although older specimens may fade to golden or pale yellow. The spots wash off with rain, but the annulus (a ring of tissue around the stem which is visible in fully open individuals) is a good indicator of genus.
Now a bit of back-story...when my husband and I were preparing to move onto his grandparent's homestead property near Olympia, we did a patrol of the acreage to see what issues might be hiding in the timber. We came upon a picture-perfect grouping of muscaria at the edge of the woods, and immediately decided to call the ranch "Toadstool Acres." The land grew several species of Amanita, but the only consistent crop of edible fungus it produced were delicate puffballs. Puffballs are quite tasty (although the species we had required "shelling" like a hard-boiled egg), but they are easy to confuse with young, unopened muscaria. Before I could fry up a batch, each puffball had to be cut in two vertically to check for the telltale outline of a muscaria's stem and cap. Puffballs are a uniform texture throughout. There's a reason one local mycological society used to hold an annual "Survivors' Banquet." Many mushrooms don't give you the opportunity to make a second mistake. Even those which don't outright kill you may have long-term consequences.
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