Mushroom foraging and how roaming the forest with purpose brings out something ancient in your soul.
Tessa flanked by myself and Kate.
The article below has been offered by Tessa Zettel, a friend and colleague of mine with whom I worked with over the many years enticing biophilia, our innate affinity with the natural world. We both strived to connect people with the ancient and sacred that is everywhere. A project that comes to mind is The hanging Gardens and Other Tales. For an art festival in Sydney, we borrowed house plants from neighbours and friends to display them alongside personal anecdotes. It was a poetic and intimate look at how we relate with our plant-friends. Beautiful and inspiring.
Tessa came to a Masterclass that I ran last weekend with Kate Grigg, a much respected edible fungi instructor from Adelaide. Thank you Tessa for your beautiful words.
I’ve been following mushrooms for a decade or so, and Diego Bonetto’s expanded foraging practice a bit longer than that. What a delight to be able to bring these two wildly generous teachers together in a Mushroom Hunt Masterclass, spending a morning fossicking around a wet forest floor with other fungi lovers to see what might be gleaned and shared. My own mushroom knowledge comes mostly from Finland, where children typically learn to pick dainty suppilovahvero and white, toothy vaalaorakas in local woods with their grandparents. Over here, many of us as settlers and migrants have a rather more complicated relationship to what we call ‘nature’, though as Diego’s Guest Co-presenter Kate Grigg points out, there is nothing natural about this area to which we have come. And so we gather around a plastic table in a State Forest of pine trees grown for toilet paper and cheap industrial timber, unceded land of the Wirudjeri holding still at least 120,000 years worth of stories, to meet with the kingdom of fungi.
Winding down from the Blue Mountains into the small town of Oberon – its name borrowed from the medieval woodland king of the fairies – seems a particularly fitting location for such an encounter. Guided by our passionate hosts, we run through the basics of different mushroom types (decomposing, parasitic and mycorrhizal), illustrated with a spread of pre-prepared specimens, then move into getting to know the individuals laid out for inspection: spindly purple ones, fat slippery jacks, bright jelly mushrooms, bracket fungi… Mushrooms are always quietly teaching you to be slow and mindful; Diego speaks of learning just one new edible species per year. Sent out with our baskets amongst the damp leaves and leeches, I’m excited to add the Grey Knight to my tiny personal list, taking note of white gills and the kink in its cap, grey and furry ‘like a mouse’. There are occasional fleshy pine mushrooms leaking their orange sap, fire engine-red Fly agaric and myriad unfamiliar characters peeping out of the earth. It’s a serious effort to not get carried away with mushroom fever and be back by the appointed time.
After collecting in a couple of sites we pause for the much-anticipated treat of mushrooms fried with garlic in the bush, and an instructive conversation about processing, preparing and preserving. I learn that a little bath of half-vinegar, half-water will wake them up before cooking, and how to make powdered mushroom salt and a very enticing dried mushroom jerky with spices. As Diego reminds us, being in the forest in silence with a purpose does something to your soul that is ancient. Carrying home with some glee a full basket of dinners-to-come, we leave altered and nourished in more ways than one.
The edible mushrooms season in NSW, Australia starts around March and finish around June. Check our website for workshops, events and masterclasses.