Halls of the Dark Muse

Yes, I know the odds that in my walking around the neighborhood I would so happen to stumble upon some notoriously difficult to find mushroom species, which experts who spend their time traipsing through the forest and know what they are looking for and where to look cannot find, but hey it is possible right?

I was out taking my walk today and I had my camera with me, for one because it had recently rained, so I thought that might help produce some interesting shots, and there is this egret whom has been tormenting me that I wanted to try and catch at last (I failed again there), and I had not been out with my camera in a while.

So I thought to myself since I was out walking around and had my camera why not try and see if I can uncover anything new in the mushroom world for my little project.

And as it happened I did come across this quite curious and rather cool looking mushroom that I had previously not seen before, there were two of them growing together, and one was quite large and round, and they had a sort of lavender tinge to them. I took some pictures and took the smaller of the two with me as a specimen I could study up close to try and identify.

First thing I did was look in one of the nature books I have to see if I could find anything that resembled it in there, and I found this type of mushroom known as Tricholoma that resembled the mushroom I found, so I decided to google it and I did a google image search when I saw a photo that was almost completely identical to my own photograph of the mushroom I found..

When I clicked on the link for the photo I found it was from a really good website that I have frequently used in my mushroom adventures called the mushroomexpert.com, and the page identified the mushroom on their website as being an American Matsutake.

While I was reading about the mushroom one of the things it said about it was that it had a very distinctive smell that was almost spice and foul at the same time, so I took a sniff of my own specimen of the mushroom and I thought that it did seem to have a bit of a tangy scent to it (perhaps that is just physiological), but to say the least I was skeptical of my findings, and I looked through several of the other mushrooms within the Tricholoma family but none so closely resembled the example I found, I even looked up a some different types of mushroom species but I couldn't find any others that looked as similar to the one I found as the Matsutake.

Though of course, in my amateur status I don't consider any of my identifications 100% positive, and there are so many different kinds of mushrooms and so many that do look so much alike there is always room for error.