I have recently had the supreme pleasure of reading Hope Jahren's Lab Girl. What a surprise it was! I was truly unprepared for the music of her words and for her unforgettable descriptions of the natural and unnatural worlds. The beauty of her prose and her obvious love of all things charmed me in ways that no other author has done ... ever. She is a powerful teacher, a person who enlightens, reveals and reassures.
Dear mushroomer, I found myself reading Chapter 3 and then reading it again and then yet again, for it reintroduced fungi to me in a way that heretofore I had not been privy to. I am forever altered by the clarity of her observation.
Plants have far more enemies than can be counted. A green leaf is regarded by almost every living thing on Earth as food. Whole trees can be eaten while they are only seeds, while they are only seedlings. A plant cannot run away from the endless legions of attackers that comprise an unremitting menace. Within the slime of the forest floor thrive opportunities that regard all plants, dead or alive, as nourishment. The fungi are perhaps the worst of these villains. White-rot and black-rot are everywhere, so named because they have chemicals that can do what nothing else can: they can rot the hardest heart of a tree. Four hundred million years of wood, save a few fossil slivers, has decomposed back to the sky from whence it came. All this destruction can be attributed to a single group of fungi that makes its macabre living by rotting the ligneous limbs and stumps of a forest. Yet within this very same group are the best - and really only - friends that trees have ever had.
You may think a mushroom is a fungus. This is exactly like believing that a penis is a man. Every toadstool, from the deliciously edible to the deathly poisonous, is merely a sex organ that is attached to to something more whole, complex, and hidden. Underneath every mushroom is a web of stringy hyphae that may extend for kilometers, wrapping around countless clumps of soil and holding the landscape together. The ephemeral mushroom appears briefly above the surface while the webbing that anchors it for years within a darker and richer world. A very small minority of these fungi - just five thousand species - have strategically entered into a deep and enduring truce with plants. They cast their stringy webbing around and through the roots of trees, sharing the burden of drawing water into the trunk. They also mine the soil for rare metals, such as manganese, copper and phosphorous, and then present them to the tree as precious gifts of the magi.
The edge of a forest is a hostile no-man's-land and trees do not grow outside this boundary for a reason. Centimeters outside a forest's border we find too little water, too little sun, too much wind or cold for just one more tree. And yet, though rarely, forests do expand and grow in area. Once within hundreds of years a seed line will conquer this harsh space and endure the requisite years of want. Such seedlings are invariably heavily armored with symbiotic below-ground fungus. So much is stacked against this little tree, although it does have twice the usual amount of root function, thanks to the fungus.
There is a price; during these first years most of the sugar that the little plant makes in its leaves will go directly into the fungus suckling at its roots. The webbing that surrounds these struggling roots does not penetrate them, however, and the plant and fungus remain physically separate but enjoined by their life's work. They anchor each other. They will work together until the tree is tall enough to fight for light at the top of the canopy.
Why are they together, the tree and the fungus? We don't know. The fungus could certainly live very well alone almost anywhere, but it chooses to entwine itself with the tree over an easier and more independent life. It was adapted to seek the rush of pure sweetness that comes directly from a plant root, such a strange and concentrated compound, unlike anything to be found elsewhere in the forest. And perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.
Hungry for more of Hope's musings and enlightenment? Purchase a copy of Lab Girl or check it out from your local library. It is indeed a very special gift.