I would like to share below some enchanting words by a dear human who came to one of my mushroom foraging workshops last year.

Kate is by now a friend and we will cross paths many more times. But in the meantime, the evocative rendering of the Mushroom Foraging class that she presents below speaks volumes of her ability to perceive and learn, assess and expand from an experience.

Thank you for your words, Kate.

Mushroom foraging workshop in NSW — Walking with people in the forest, looking for edible mushrooms and connection

At the start of April I gather in a group of strangers to be greeted by Diego Bonetto doing star-jumps at the edge of a state forest. He’s a person of such exuberance that he almost hovers in the air with each jump, like the Super Mario characters that he no doubt gets likened to.

We’ve gathered for a mushroom foraging workshop. We’re here to learn something that “the Ukranians and Poles have known to do for generations”, as Diego says. Which is to meander through pine plantations each autumn and winter in search of Saffron Milkcaps and Slippery Jacks.

Something I’ve noticed is that since COVID, a more diverse range of people are attending the events I go to. Usually the circles I travel in attract hippies, artists, conservationists, and other fringe-dwellers, but I’ve seen an increasing number of more mainstream folks turning up to events like these saying, “I’m not sure why I’m here. I just wanted to try something different”.

I’m proud of these people for following their gut. COVID shook up everyone’s ability to plan for the future, and many people on the well-travelled road of mainstream society have started to wander off into darker forest corners. Like this one.

COVID changed people’s interest in these types of skills from mere curiosity to a sense of something like urgency. Whether that’s the urgency of an end-of-world prepper, or the existential urgency of needing to get out from behind the screen and connect to something that feels alive.

We spend about four hours in the forest. First doing little reconnaissance missions and returning with our findings for Diego to check, and then longer ones, going into more remote corners of the eerily vast rows of pines.

The Eastern Europeans-Australians that Diego mentioned earlier continue to gather in this and other Australian pine plantations each year after Easter, carrying on the tradition from their ancestors in the Northern Hemisphere.

Recently I met an English woman who described to me the yearly foraging calendar that her family would follow. It’s interesting to me how white Australians have not carried over their foraging traditions, despite having still carried over a vast number of plants which now are simply dubbed ‘Invasive’ and blasted with Round Up.

How could I, as an Anglo-Australian, and others like me, reconnect to our foraging traditions? Diego is trying to help.

At the end of the day he cooks a collection of saffron milkcaps with garlic and herbs and serves them to us on sourdough from the Bread & Butter Project. The meal is about more than giving out a sample – it’s about introducing wild food to our senses, to our bodies, and into our lives.

The mushrooms are more delicious than any I’ve ever eaten before. Someone asks how the nutritional profile of these wild funghi compares to that of supermarket mushrooms and Diego replies, “You can’t compare it. The stuff on the supermarket shelves is not food. It’s just fodder”.

The day is peppered with questions about the vast variety of funghi that we find in the forest, and Diego is fastidious in giving us notes on how to prevent us eating something we may regret. He describes that the number of fungi that can be confidently identified is miniscule compared to the number of species that are thought to exist.

Diego shares how one of many ways to help identify our chosen species of the day, Saffron Milkcaps and Slipper Jacks, is that they always grow in proximity to pine trees. Relational thinking, that plants and animals develop in relationship with each other, is something that Indigenous cultures the world over intrinsically understand, and the Western mind is still catching up with. As John Muir says, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Relational thinking is crucial to properly identifying plants, as so many edible plants have toxic lookalikes. Tasty elderberry and famously-fatal hemlock could be confused if you were only looking at the similar looking flowering seed heads. Knowing what a plant grows in companionship with, the type of terrain, conditions, and regions that it grows in are as important as ogling a little picture on an app.

And this is why it is so important to walk in the forest. Because you begin to understand relationship. I didn’t find any mushrooms on the day of the workshop, and determined to develop the ‘mushroom eyes’ that Diego described, I returned to the same forest another time and walked its rows for two days. I found many saffron milkcaps, but more importantly, what I discovered was patterns of relationship. I started to note that they liked to grow under the protection of slight bracken canopies, and that they frequently grew near water. I’m only at the absolute infancy of funghi identification, and I know if I had spent more time in the forest I would have learned more and more of these patterns in greater and greater subtlety.

This kind of relational thinking is what could save the world. Because it’s only a mind that regards the world in isolated chunks, in soundbites and giphs, that could imagine that spraying RoundUp will only affect the one dandelion it’s been spritzed on. A relational mind understands that it soaks deep into the soil, washes far and wide into our waterways, clings to the skins of our frogs, and kills the insects who we rely on to pollinate our food.

Diego’s edible weed courses impart in immense detail how poisoning the plants that we have castigated as weeds does the entire world a disservice, when we could instead befriend (refriend!) these ancient plants and bring them back into our kitchens and medicine cupboards. And how mushrooms we stroll past in the woods could become a highly nutritious part of our diets.

When I return from Diego’s mushroom foraging workshop a more mainstream-minded friend of mine asks me where I’ve been. When I tell him I’ve been learning how to forage for mushrooms his eyes flair wide and he says, “Magic mushrooms?” in the tone of excitement that sparks up around any discussion of contraband. When I tell him otherwise and describe what we actually harvested, he seems disappointed. “Oh. Whenever anyone talks about mushroom foraging I assume it’s for magic ones”.

It’s hard for me to impart to him the fact that the experience didn’t need to be psychoactive for it to be magical. Being presented with gifts from the forest floor, nourished directly by the earth, is a simple, visceral form of magic that many people have lost, and many people are craving.

I hope that Diego’s skills, and most importantly, Diego’s worldview will become common again around the world so that we can once again see the magic in all mushrooms, and all of creation.

Kate is currently working with her partner Leafy creating avenues of nature learning. Seek them out here>

The magic in all mushrooms, and all of creation.