If it is hot and oppressively humid, if the air seems riddled with flying insects, and if ticks wave from trail-edge grasses, the mushroom gods are smiling on you: It is time to hunt chanterelles, the delectable ectomycorrhizal mushrooms that fruit after rain has fallen on hardwood forests. In New York’s Hudson Valley chanterelles appear at the claustrophobic height of summer, on the leaf-littered floor beneath their partner-trees. These warm-weather mushrooms also grow in the company of some very curious plants, whose habits and appearance are as interesting as the mushrooms themselves, giving us a glimpse of the teeming subterranean world beneath our hiking feet.
Let’s walk. Bring bug spray.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
Since chancing upon our first chanterelles on a hike in the Hudson Valley in 2018, my husband and I have made a hopeful pilgrimage to the same spot almost every summer. (We had to skip 2020 because the trailhead’s parking area had been transformed into a drive-in COVID testing site.) In the green shade of the cloyingly warm summer woods, we walk swatting at insects, mostly no-see-ums intent on sipping from our eyeballs before becoming trapped in our lashes. There’s quite a lot of swearing. And sweating.
Each walk’s mid-point is a stream where we dip our feet into the clean water and picnic in the company of tiny crayfish and minnows.
We even visited last year, in denial during a months-long drought that crisped the understory and all but dried up the stream. Needless to say, the mushroom world was silent. We wondered if the chanterelles would survive at all. How resilient is a mycelial network? Do their partner-trees’ roots keep them alive?
Mycorrhizal mushrooms grow in partnership with green plants; each benefits from the relationship. Ectomycorrhizal mushrooms like chanterelles form sheaths over the root tips of these plants, in this case particular species of trees (here, probably oaks). The mushrooms make minerals from the soil available to the trees, and the photosynthesizing trees send down carbohydrates from the canopy.
One of the first plants to greet us as we walk is pipsissewa, Chimaphila maculata. Also known commonly as prince’s pine and spotted wintergreen, its distinctive evergreen leaves are a welcome sight even on the most bitter of hikes in the middle of winter. Right now winter seems impossible. It is a privilege to see the pretty plants growing here at frequent intervals because pipsissewa is endangered in several states (like Maine), and is considered extirpated in parts of its range.
Beneath the tall trees we follow a path brushed by ferns. Beneath out feet is a hidden world of fungal conversation with tree roots. Soon, we begin to see the now-familiar companions of the mushrooms we are hunting. Plants, yet blanched and alien, they resemble fungi more than anything leafy. They contain no chlorophyll; instead, they are mycoheterotrophs, poaching their nutrition from their mycorrhizal neighbors. These pale denizens of the leaf litter can grow in deep shade, relying on the photosynthesizing trees and the fungal partners that act as essential couriers.
