MULTISPECIES WORLDBUILDING LAB

EPISODE 8: PAUL SADOWSKI

EXCERPTS FROM JOHN CAGE

So to introduce this: Cage would give performances where he was seated at a table with a desk lamp and he would read to the audience and there were different settings and things, procedures shall we say, or performances associated with it. One of them was a series of ninety stories which he read. And there were stories from his life. Some of them were mushroom stories, but, you know, there were all sorts of topics. Each of them, regardless of length, had to fill a one-minute interval. So the short stories would be very distended. And the wordier ones had to be very quickly read. And then in the background, David Tudor would be running around the studio, pounding on pianos, hitting gongs, using ratchets, all sorts of sounds that interrupted the reading that Cage was making. 

These are excerpts from John Cage’s writing about mushrooms. So when he’s in the first person, it’s John Cage, who’s addressing. 

# 1 

“Let me show you my recent text. It is called “Mushroom Book.” I had for many years wanted to write a mushroom book, and I found that when I concentrated on mushrooms, it was not interesting. So what I did was to list all the things that interested me. So: mushroom stories, excerpts from Thoreau’s ‘Journal’ about mushrooms, excerpts from Thoreau’s ‘Journal’ – anything, remarks about life and art, or art and life, life and art, life and light, life, or art and art. By that I mean life becoming art, and I think of Fuller.” 

# 2  

“I think that there must be found a kind of common denominator between those who, like Mao, rely on power and those, like Fuller, who have a faith in the goodness of material, of material having. You see, Fuller like Mao believes in the goodness of human nature, and he thinks that what makes people bad is the fact that they do not have what they need. If they had what they needed, they would be less selfish than they are when they do not have what they need.

“I have noticed too with our mushroom society in New York that when the weather is dry and there are few mushrooms, the people are very secretive and selfish and they do not let anyone know they have found anything, they hunt very quickly.

I noticed too with myself that as I have what I need, I look at our large stores in New York and I do not see anything that I want.”

# 3 

 “Lois Long (the Lois Long who designs textiles), Christian Wolff, and I climbed Slide Mountain along with Guy Nearing and the Flemings, including Willie. All the way up and down the mountain we found nothing but Collybia platyphylla, so that I began to itch to visit a cemetery in Millerton, New York, where, in my mind’s eye, Pluteus cervinus was growing. By the time we got back to the cars, our knees were shaking with fatigue and the sun had gone down. Nevertheless, I managed to persuade Lois Long and Christian Wolff to drive over to Millerton. It meant an extra hundred miles. We arrived at the cemetery at midnight. I took a flashlight out of the glove compartment, got out, and first hastily and then carefully examined all the stumps and the ground around them. There wasn’t a single mushroom growing. Going back to the car, I fully expected Lois Long and Christian Wolff to be exasperated. However, they were entranced. The aurora borealis, which neither of them had ever seen before, was playing in the northern sky.”

# 4 

“‘Elizabeth, it is a beautiful day. Let us take a walk. Perhaps we will find some mushrooms. If we do, we shall pluck them and eat them.’ Betsy Zogbaum asked Marian Powys Grey whether she knew the difference between mushrooms and toadstools. ‘I think I do. But consider, my dear, how dull life would be without a little uncertainty in it.'”

06:00  PAUL SADOWSKI

My name is Paul Sadowski. I am an amateur mycologist and my day job is a music publisher. That activity is what brought me into contact with John Cage. And then John Cage brought me to mushrooms.

06:23   FIFTY-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF NY MYCOLOGICAL SOCIETY

In 2012, the New York Mycological Society was celebrating its 50-year anniversary, which was coincident with John Cage’s Centennary. So a committee was formed and I, Gary Lincoff and Pam Cray were members of this committee to plan an event that would appropriately celebrate the club and Cage. We came up with an idea to try to have a sort of mashup of mushroom and music. My thinking hinged on a project I had worked with as an undergraduate: a production of a piece that Cage wrote together with Lejaron Hiller at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana called HPSCHD, which is an abbreviation, if you will, of harpsichord. And this project, this piece, was composed of several sonic streams. There were four harpsichordists playing music from Mozart’s Dice Game pieces, which Cage had randomized in his way. There were films of NASA projects, all sorts of outer space stuff and rockets launching and stuff that basically covered every surface of the art gallery which held this project. There were I believe 64 channels of computer-generated sound that Lejaron Hiller had put together, literally beeps and bops and things. It was quite a cacophony. 32 slide projectors: these were projecting slides that Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg had put together. They’re sort of these fractal stained-glass things which were overlaid on all of the space footage from NASA. 

So all of this was going on simultaneously for about two hours or so. People were milling around in the middle of this whole circus of stuff going on. So we thought it would be interesting to do that, an interesting formula to try to approximate. We ended up in a more or less proscenium space, so we were at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City.

We decided to, as the audio component or one of the audio components was to do a realization of a piece by John Cage called 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs. This piece had been commissioned by Jann Wenner upon the move of Rolling Stone from San Francisco to New York City. So several pieces were commissioned at that time, and this was one of them. As I mentioned, I had a long association with Cage. I was his music copyist and I walked in one day and there was a Hagstrom map on his kitchen table or his dining room table, which had all of these triangles and different colors drawn upon it. And these triangles were triangulated locations. There were addresses that were chosen by chance operations, the I Ching throwing and stuff. The instructions for the piece are you go to the location and record what’s happening there. And then it’s played back. Three of them linked up as these so-called Waltzes.

So anyway, we did a realization of that piece as a 90-minute backdrop for the rest of the performance, which consisted of five readers who had chosen texts from Cage’s mushroom writings—so, the Mushroom Book and certain mushrooms stories from Indeterminacy and other things that appeared in his voluminous writings that Gary Lincoff had actually gone through pre-internet, you know, you couldn’t just search for things. He actually went through the books and extracted all of these stories and compiled them. So that provided the live element. And then Pam put together three ninety-minute films comprised of still photography of mushrooms, film clips, and videos. Some were interviews with long-time society members and we had a clip from a documentary of Cage hunting in Rockland County. 

And so the evening went. Three of these films simultaneously happening. And behind the audience was the, the sounds that we had Emily Harris and I had collected. Instead of following the score that Cage had written, we put out the call to the society for people to give us specific locations where they have seen mushrooms growing within the five boroughs, letting that be the randomizing situation. And so for a couple of years, Emily and I went out and we’d record two minutes or something somewhere. Wonderful coincidences ensued, which was then mixed down and played behind the audience while the readers were reading and their eyes are filled with all of the images. So that was the piece, the 90-minute piece that we played before an audience of about 700 people.

13:06  CAGE AND MUSHROOMS AT THE NEW SCHOOL

Now, John Cage had studied music with Henry Cowell at the New School. I mean he studied previously with Arnold Schoenberg but in New York he took classes with Henry Cowell who was probably best remembered for applying the fist to the piano keys. Fistful chords on the piano. Anyway Cage had an association with the New School thereby, and was asked to teach a music class. And he said he would do so only if he could teach a class in mushrooms. He had some exposure to mycology and you know, he was the valedictorian of his high school class. He was a very, very studied, well-read person. He had the capacity for this kind of thing. And eventually he came to New York City, he was living downtown on the Lower East Side and then for one reason or another, he moved up to Stony Point where he lived for a time in a farmhouse that had a lot of people living there. It was a kind of an artist colony. He would go out and walk in the woods, the property as it’s known today adjoins Harriman State Park. So there were plentiful opportunities for wandering around the woods there and Cage found mushrooms. He came upon actually not a mushroom, but he either thought he found a Helebore, which is edible. And it turned out to be skunk cabbage or vice versa. I’m not sure, but everybody got sick and ended up in Nyack Hospital where the nurse told him, “If you’re going to fool around with this stuff. You should find somebody who knows what they’re doing.” And this woman knew about this person well-known in the area. He was actually himself a horticulturist. He had nurseries and so forth. He did a lot of work with rhododendrons. He did all kinds of grafting of exotic rhododendrons with native species and produced anyway, a lot of rhododendrons that were widely sought after and built himself a very good reputation in all things botanical. So she said, you should get to know this person, his name is Guy Nearing. So Guy Nearing and John formed an association. Guy Nearing was his teacher, in fact. 

So, um, what happened? So this brings us now back to the New School. So Cage and Nearing actually were teaching the class. Of course, John Cage is the famous one so he gets the lion’s share of the credit, but Guy Nearing was very much a prominent figure in this class. He was the first naturalist at a new Wildlife Conservancy that was put together in the Palisades called the Greenbrook Sanctuary. It was formed as part of the Interstate Palis ades Commission. He laid out most of the trails that are there today, and he also did a survey of the fungi of the property. So, he was probably the most accomplished mycologist outside of the New York Botanical Garden in this area. 

So Cage and Nearing taught this class and the class was basically a schedule, not unlike the New York Mycological Society is today, of field trips. For the most part, they were going out in the woods and collecting mushrooms and explaining them to people. So it turns out this class was an elective, and it was the least expensive class that the New School had to offer. So you had a lot of, let’s call them foul weather friends, you know, just people who took it so they could get a discount on trips to Europe and things like that. It’s like today, if you’re a student, you can get an Apple computer at a student rate. So that kind of held up in other commercial things. And so people took this class to get the commercial advantage of being a student officially enrolled. Anyway, this class was taught for a couple of years, I think. It became rather unwieldy as Cage put it in a letter to the society. He said it became rather like a parent with an adolescent. He said, you know, it was just too much responsibility for the leaders of the group and not enough responsibility taken by the members of the group. And so they decided to create a society with what they considered significant dues. You know, you had to have a little skin in the game. It wasn’t just like, “Oh, come and look for mushrooms with us.” And that’s how it started. And Laurette Shapiro was the first secretary. And in fact it was rather a threadbare administration. There were only two officers, one was a treasurer and one was the secretary. There was no president, no vice president. So it has always existed and still does to this day, exists as a kind of an anarchy in the best sense of the word. It is a group of people who look for mushrooms. That’s what it’s all about. It does do all things mushroomy and in terms of projects and directions and so forth, you basically volunteer to do something and the resources of the society are there to support the person in this project whenever it happens to be. And so it goes. It’s remained pretty decentralized, you know? And so it’s quite a marvelous group actually.

19:50  AUTOGRAPHY and FRIENDSHIP WITH CAGE

So, Cage and Nearing and three other people—I’m going to remember two of them, Esther Dam and Frank Ferrara and there’s a fifth one, but they were the founding members of the club. So they basically sustained the club. Eventually Cage, his career really took off at some point. And, probably around the time I started to work for him maybe a little before, he became very highly commissioned. And, so when I got out of college in 1973 is when I started working for him. I actually met him in during that HPSCHD program and then subsequently a year later, there was a production at BAM in what was then the Leperq space, which is now Joe’s Cafe. In the Leperq space, we did a production and cause I was in charge of these slides. Since I was involved with the slides, I was kind of shepherding those to his apartment and it was on the ride over the Brooklyn Bridge that we talked about my work at that point, which was working as what was known as an autographer. This is where my music career kind of took off. Autography is an artisanal practice of basically drawing music, rendering music to resemble printed music.

And so we discussed the work that lay ahead of him. He had a bunch of commissions, and that’s how we kinda got started as how I got started working for John. When you see printed sheet music— at least say prior to 1980—this music was engraved. There would be a metal plate and various dyes. So you’d have a dye with a note, an oval that would be the note. You would have an instrument of five tines, like a fork if you will, called a rostral–that would draw the staff’s lines. You would make an impression in the copper or bronze, I think copper sheets. And you would draw that rostral across those would be your staff lines, and then you would hammer the various notes into place. And then score the stems and the ligatures, and all of the other things that make up printed sheet music. So that’s how it was done way back when. But it also had been done by pen and ink. And that’s what I learned from an autographer by the name of Carlo Carnevale. His father worked for Verdi and his mother worked for Puccini. So, you know, it was a long line of this kind of fine handiwork. And I learned this craft from Carlo. That’s kind of how I came with that skill set to meet John Cage. And then I worked for him for about twenty years. And I worked till he died in 1992.

23:36  APARTMENT HOUSE 1776 and MUSHROOMS IN ALBANY

So this happened in probably 1975, I would say maybe August. We were working on one of his bicentennial commissions. It was called Apartment House 1776. And so this was a group of pieces that John would randomize some way or other, that would be performed by several ensembles that would represent the music that was extant in 1776. So there was a group of Moravian music. There was a string quartet. There was even music that featured Negro spirituals. There was American Indian. They were at the front of the stage and then behind them was the orchestra that was playing a whole other piece called Renga, which was derived from the drawings of Thoreau. So he kind of picked out little things and made visual scores of them. There were a lot of swoops and punctuations and, you know, kind of randomized music going on.

Anyway, that was the piece we were working on. So at the time I was living outside of Albany, which is where I grew up. And he came up to Albany to work on this piece. He was basically proofreading the material I had put together. It was a rainy rainy week for the most part. But Saturday came and the sun was out and he said, “we’re not going to work today. I want to go out.” He said, “take me someplace where there are old trees and lawns there aren’t too well mowed.” So I took him to a local cemetery, the Albany rural cemetery. And we drove around in the station wagon and we did some car foraging. So, you know, every now and then he’d stop and we’d get out of the car and we’d find mushrooms and put them in the basket. And so forth. By the end of the afternoon, we had gathered quite a lot and he basically focused on edible mushrooms. That afternoon it was not a mycological exploration. It was focusing on things that he was familiar with. And we went back to my apartment and he cooked everything up and we ate it all, each mushroom prepared a different way to accentuate its flavor. And then we washed down with some Montepulciano or something. Anyway. That was the big mycological adventure I had with Cage. 

27:35  CAGE’S DEATH and HEALING

What actually brought me to mushrooms had to do with his death, which came rather suddenly. He had had a couple of minor strokes that didn’t do that much damage. But the big one came on August 12th of 1992 as he was making his dinner. That was the end of the line for John. 

And so I was kind of left, bereaved. He was a friend at that point. He was a patron. So there was a big hole there and one of the little mushroomy things that did happen while he was alive, what came about… An incident: my father who likes mushrooms and decided he knew enough about mushrooms to go look without any experience or knowledge of it. And he did finally get sick from eating mushrooms and I decided I had to get him a field guide or something. Cause you know, he was just flying by the seat of the pants. He’d just see a mushroom and people often do this, they say, “Oh, that looks so good. Yeah, that looks delicious.” Which is foolhardy. You know, lots of people have made that mistake. So I asked John, “John, I want to get a book from my father.” And so, he made a couple of recommendations and one of them was the Audubon Guide to North American Mushrooms which I bought. And I was reading through the preface and in that preface Gary Lincoff, the author, wrote about how he came to mushrooms and it was through John Cage! So there was this connection there.

And so August 12th, John died. And I, up to that point, I was starting to think about a hobby. Before that, as I mentioned it was a full-time job plus, and I was at a point I was working for John, but I also had other clients, and so I was working a lot. Too much and not getting out in the woods enough. And so I thought to have a hobby, which would get me out into the woods and also might, in the acquisition of Latin binomials, might keep my brain going in my dotage. And so a friend suggested I go to the New York Botanical Garden and take their beginning mushroom class up there in September, which was being taught by Gary Lincoff. 

So that’s how it happened. And it turned out that Gary, over the next twenty years, and I became very good friends and, in fact, after he died, again I was kind of bereft and you know upset, and realized—it hit me even harder than Cage’s did because it was Gary that actually helped heal me from Cage’s loss.

31:03  GARY LINCOFF and MUSHROOMS IN FIVE DIMENSIONS

I guess the best way to talk about Gary is to talk about the club. So I joined the club. Now, this is in 1992. After the last day of class, Gary handed out an information sheet for people to introduce them to a way of going on with their mushroom activity. And the New York Mycological Society was listed as one of the resources. So, there was a phone number. There was no web page in 1992, very hard to find the New York Mycological Society. I have a feeling in a way that may have been a good thing because you had to be a hunter to find them, you know. I think that was a good thing! 

But in any case, it was rather easy for me. I had a phone number and I talked to Wilbur Williams, the treasurer, and paid my dues and began going on walks with them. And it was an interesting group of people. And it was at the end of the season when I joined up. So it wasn’t until the 1993 season that we really got rolling. It was a smaller group at that point. And so there were a number of personalities that we became acquainted with, but all of whom or most of whom at least were very friendly, very free with their information, very interested in telling you whatever they knew about mushrooms. It remains really the best way to learn about mushrooms is to join a mushroom club because it’s very much an in-your-hand experience, you know.  A mushroom in a photograph is really a two dimensional thing and you need to study mushrooms in really four dimensions or five dimensions. You need to know their length and width and depth three, their smell, and how they proceed in time, particularly with certain species. So it really is a much more complicated affair than looking at a photograph and comparing it to another photograph. That’s definitely not optimal. And that hands-on experience is something that you get, you know, on a trail with someone who knows about the mushroom. They’re going to tell you things that you aren’t likely to find in one place at any particular time. 

So one of the people who was the go-to person in the club was Gary Lincoff, and he just had an encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms. And so you not only learned the basics, you learned some of the subtleties. You learned the aspects of the habitat, the ecology, you know, the whole nine yards was what Gary would bring.

So those walks were precious. And we were like his acolytes. I mean, we’d roll up to our lunch place and we’d eat our food and then lay out our mushrooms. And Gary would go through, who knows hundreds of mushrooms and, go through at least 20 or 30 of them and give you a complete descriptive, really encyclopedia-type essay on each one. So he was invaluable. He was funny. Eugenia Bone, who wrote a book called Mycophilia featured Gary in large part. And she called him the “borscht belt mycologist” because he had an impeccable sense of comedic timing, very very very entertaining. 

Over the years, one of the aspects of the New York Mycological Society that has been part of its structure is that we have our walks and then in the wintertime, there are lectures. So you have something to do during the so-called off-season. So Gary was the person who organized that and brought in people, but he always had at least one lecture, you know, when he would talk about things, always in a sort of off-beat way. It was never a dry lecture. There was just a little entertainment built into it, you know. That was his profession. He did mushrooms all the time. He taught botany as well. He was actually a first-rate botanist, in addition to a first-rate mycologist. He’s more well-known as a mycologist because that was his passion, but at the botanical garden, he educated thousands of botanists, you know, and he taught these intensive classes in botany.

I can tell you, he knew the botanical gardens so well, he could do it blind because he went through a period of blindness. He had hurt his back severely, and he was in so much pain, he was put on steroids. And the corticosteroids will cause a cataract to form on your eyes. And so he was telling me one night at dinner, he was like teaching these classes in botany. And he said, if it weren’t for the fact that I knew the garden so well, he said, I couldn’t see the tree, but he knew where it was and he could feel, and, you know, so he was a first-rate botanist. You don’t need me to testify to that, there are many people who have given that testimony. In any event, he was not just a good teacher and it wasn’t just his technical information he passed on, he was a real inspiration. He was one of those people who didn’t just talk the talk, he really walked the talk. I mean, he was very, very complete. It was a holistic kind of situation. So he inspired me to delve into microscopy and all of that.

37:43  EXPLORING GREENBROOK / PALISADES FUNGI

Greenbrook is an interesting place. It sits out there on the top of the Palisades kind of across from Yonkers is about five miles North of the George Washington Bridge. If you look at a map of the Palisades Parkway, you see it do this curious little loop around and there’s brass plaque at the site sanctuary saying that this was founded by the New Jersey Ladies Garden Club, something like that. And you think of a bunch of Ms. Marples running around working on flowers and whatnot. This was probably a pretty powerful formidable group of women. And so it was built and there’s a fence around it. It’s a fenced in property and this made it very attractive for women to go to because you could feel safe there, and you still have to unlock a lock to get in, you know, your membership card is key.

So Lynn had been leading these walks and I had gone on a few with her. And was introduced to Lynn through the then-naturalist, a woman by the name of Nancy Slovic. Sadly Lynn left us in 2001. After her passing, Nancy asked me if I could take over the walks. I could not have even entertained the thought of doing that if I hadn’t hung out with Gary so much, because he not only taught you about mushrooms, but he taught you about teaching. I had always done a little bit of teaching, but I felt better prepared through my association with Gary. So I started doing these walks annually and after a time she said, “you know, Paul, there’s a project that I have in mind”. And I said, “what’s that?” She said, “well, there was Guy Nearing originally here and he had done a fungal survey. There’s a list.” And she said, “I had Gary go through the list so he’s updated the nomenclature, but I thought it might be interesting for us to do a new survey of the property to compare to the 1949 list.”

The scientific method if you will, of a mycologist is to make collections and to describe them. To classify them and kind of organize them. In the classification, you end up organizing them according to habitat and you know what plants they’re associated with. Mushrooms, probably everybody knows by now have relationships with plants through their root systems. So making a list is just like what mycologists and botanists do. It really is the scaffolding of the profession. It provides one with the information that one needs to come to a greater understanding of the place of fungi in the world, how they interact with our world, how we interact with them and so forth. So that’s how it works. 

And so Guy made a list of the mushrooms. I mean, that’s the first, most elemental part of it. What would grow out of that eventually would be a book with descriptions and, you know, supporting literature and photography and so forth. 

42:06  NANCY SAID, LET’S DO THIS PROJECT

Nancy said, let’s do this project. And she finally nagged me enough and I said, okay. And we set off on this scientific adventure. Up to this point, I was basically pot hunting, meaning we were hunting for food. So I was kind of an itinerant, going to places where I would find morels in the spring and then there would usually be a break till the summer season started up. And then we would go looking for, you know, Lactarius in the hot months of July and the Black Trumpets and the Chanterelles. And you go to the places that are good habitats for those things. So, you know, you’re off to Vermont in August, you’re in Oak woods in July, you’re under beech trees in August. So you go where the trees are, where you’re likely to find the mushroom that you want to put into your dinner that night. And that’s kind of how mushrooming was for me. 

Now, there are a lot of other mushrooms. I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of species, the fleshy mushrooms, you know. We’ll put them in the thousands of species in our area, most of which we ignore because we’re kind of laser-focused on Chanterelles. As soon as you see a Chanterelle, you go for it and you spend your time there to pick every last one. Then you go looking for another patch of yellow in the woods and ignore everything else in between, right? 

A survey is a whole other exploration. And so that’s really when I grew into whatever level of mycology I’ve found myself in today. So then I was no longer kicking Russulas. I was picking them and trying to figure out what they were, and in order to do that, you needed to get the microscope out. That’s when I was now confronted with the polypores, which are something we generally ignore unless they’re a Chicken of the Woods or a Hen of the Woods. We were largely ignoring those because I didn’t really have much use for them, but now there was a lot there to study. So in fact, I ended up going to Maine to study with Tom Volk at Eagle Hill, which is a wonderful summer school, if you will, that’s up in Steuben, Maine, a little North of Acadia. It’s a great place and beautiful, and it’s intensive every day you’re in the classroom and then in the field. It’s like eight hours a day and I would spend the evenings just kind of poring over things and trying to figure them out. Microscopes. You brought literature with you and you could just do a total zone in on polypores. 

Those are the years 2007/2008 that the New York Mycological Society and members of the Greenbrook Association — it’s called the Palisades Nature Association actually — would get together on weekends to make collections of fungi that we found in Greenbrook. One of the things I neglected to say was that I did say it was a conservancy. One of the rules that you must abide by is you don’t pick anything. So we were allowed to pick mushrooms to do this work. The project was advised basically by Nancy who was a first-rate naturalist who studied all things botanical and otherwise, very familiar with all the flora and fauna of the area. She set up the protocols that we followed. So, we accessioned everything. We had people following a protocol that included in situ photography. Then we would pick the collection. Then that would be brought to a staging place where we would then do studio photography as best we could. And then everything was labeled with its location and the surrounding trees and so forth. It was in itself for the people who participated, it was a great way to learn about how to do this kind of work. 

For me, I was then confronted with trying to identify these mushrooms that I had, many of which I had no idea what their names were. And so NYMS and those Monday night meetings were invaluable because we have some really very, very well informed people in the club who could look at something and say, Oh, that’s that. That’s that. That’s that. 

47:43  MUSHROOMS AND RAIN

We did this work every Saturday or Sunday for two years. And in its broad outlines, it was quite interesting. Overall, we made 1,400 collections. The summer of 2007 was a rather thunderstormy summer. So you’d have these fronts coming through, deluge, then cool breezy air behind the front that would dry everything out. That summer, we found a little over 400 collections. The next year was filled with rain events, which are more like the one we’re having today and yesterday. These low pressure systems that would come through and you’d have a several-day rain event, not particularly deluge-full, but rainy, consistent rain. And that year we found over a thousand, so we more than doubled our collecting. On that point alone, it was instructive just to show how, what the interplay of hydration and fungi can result in. In between those two summers, I went up in the winter and that’s when I first started looking at mushrooms in the winter time and I was surprised by what I found. Particularly looking at the polypores, which are rather durable, but we find all sorts of things like the split-gill mushroom, the Schizophyllum commune, oysters, which grow all year round, and other species, which are very cold-tolerant, you know. The Enoki, for example. 

That is really where we kind of got our feet wet. Gary said, well, I think you should make a presentation to the society on the work that you do. You know, so I did this thing and it had everything but the kitchen sink in it but you know, you have to start somewhere. So Gary was in so many ways, he taught me about mushrooms, but he also led me into other activities, until eventually, you know, he kindly suggested that I take over his classes at the botanical gardens. So I’ve been doing that for the last couple of years since he left us. 

50:51  A MUSHROOM THAT WAS OUT OF PLACE

One of the things to illustrate what seemed anomalous to me at the time was this mushroom I found. It was a polypore. A polypore is a durable mushroom that we generally find growing on wood. And when I say durable mushroom to differentiate it from the more evanescent ones we find. So, your typical fleshy mushroom that you find — be it a Chanterelle or a Morel or whatever you find growing with a cap and a stem as a rule — are mushrooms that are destined to be basically rotten in a couple of weeks. So they come up, they produce spores, and then they demise one way or other. The polypores will grow more — they have a much more complicated cellular structure, which will ensure their continual presence over a short or even long period of time, say within a season or perennially, that will have periods of production of spores and senescence, where they’re basically not producing. So you have a period where they’re growing and producing spores then say it dries out. Then rain comes for a longer period of time during which time they then begin to grow more of these spore-producing cells and produce spores. And so they go back and forth between these two states. But they may be around for, as I said, a season, there are annuals. And then there are these polypores that grow for many years. Year after year, they add a new layer of spore-producing cells. So anyway, these are known as the polypores. 

I found these polypores in November. Some of them were just starting to form and other older ones had been out for awhile. I took them home and I keyed them out in a book I had on polypores. So when I say I keyed them out, I used a book that contains many descriptions of many fungi. You have this structure at the beginning of a chapter or the book, or both places that will lead you to a particular identification or a genus or a species. So it’s a stepwise list that you work your way through to lead you to a possible solution. So I did this, I went through the key with this mushroom that I had found, and it turned out it keyed out beautifully to a mushroom described in the book or named in the book as Polyporus elegans. The only problem with it: it was a southern species. It was not a northern species, and we’re technically speaking a northern species. So, I put the name on it because it seemed to fit and kind of left the mystery of “why is it here” for another day. 

The other day came, some years later when Gary was teaching a class for the Connecticut Westchester Mycological Association known as COMA, in a class that COMA ran called Mushroom University. Gary was teaching a series of classes, ten or something on Saturday mornings, on polypores. And so he came out and he named this mushroom and I said, Gary, I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s something else. And it turned out into a long exploration. We ended up consulting Tom Volk and others, and it turned out it was this southern species. And it’s all throughout the North now, from the Midwest where Tom is out there in Wisconsin all the way through. It’s now known as Tramedes gibosa. So that seems to indicate to me — I don’t think it’s good science to conclude that this is somehow indicating global warming or climate change, but it could be, you know. It might be a contribution to that point of view. 

56:26  GEOLOGY MATTERS

But something else that’s happened. Greenbrook is situated on the Palisades escarpment. Now it’s an interesting bit of geology going on there. When lava flows into cracks in sedimentary rock, they form either sills or dikes. Dikes are vertical. Sills are horizontal. On my many rides between my home base, which was up around Albany in New York on the train, I would look across the Hudson and see these columns. There’s a colonnade of rocks, which are the Palisades and I always assumed they were dikes, because they’re vertical. But in fact, the Palisades are a very thick sill of diabase. That is, lava that has insinuated itself between layers of sandstone. And the columns that you see are actually like a honeycombed kind of crystallization of this sill. The sill kind of is at a very acute angle. So it’s maybe say 12 degrees, you know. So it’s almost horizontal, but it’s just a little bit off. But what you see at the Hudson River is like the shearing off of this sheet of lava that remains today. So kind of interesting. I have to say that in studying papers on certain mushrooms, you know, when you do this sort of thing, you spend your time in the library. There was one paper that really caught my attention by a Scottish mycologist working in England by the name of Roy Watling. And I think this might’ve been his master’s thesis, I’m not sure. But looking at the work, it talked about the mushrooms that he found in this locality, but he really introduced the whole thing with a study of its geology. So geology is a determinant factor in all kinds of habitat that grow there and you have to consider the various geological things that have happened. 

So you have Greenbrook, as I said, sitting on top of this diabase sill. And you have to remember that maybe 10,000 years ago, this had been a glacier. The glaciers receded and basically scraped this sill off clean. The sandstone that was on top of it — remember the sill is in interstices between two layers of sandstone, and I won’t go into the story of how the sand got there, because that’s a whole other lecture. But there we were, and the sandstone had been just wiped clean off of this diabase. And so whatever the succession of probably lichens and mosses and fungi, and then vascular plants, it is that the plants that have brought the organic soil to the top of the Palisades. And indeed, because of the structure of the Greenbook Sanctuary, you can see this very clearly. As you get to the East where the face of the Palisades is, it’s very exposed and rocky. It’s rather bowl-shaped. In the center of Greenbrook, there’s a pond. And one of the naturalists there who told me he was in the pond for some reason, doing something in his waders. And he said, it’s only about maybe two and a half feet deep of mud before you’re on rock again. It’s interesting to consider in terms of the fragility, if you will, almost the evanescence in geological terms of the organic stuff that is, we call soil that is now present there in Greenbrook and everywhere around here that has a rocky substrate. So this was, I thought, a very interesting aspect of it. And it was a consideration that I got from Roy Watling to look at the geological underpinnings of a situation.

In the geological scheme, you had the glaciation, then the recession of the glaciers, then you had the slow colonization of the rock face by the succession of organisms. Maybe three or 400 years ago, it was probably mostly Eastern hemlock. That was the dominant tree in our area that has receded northward over the last 25, 30 years. You had these beautiful stands of Eastern hemlock and then the lengthening winters and the milding of the winters has made the presence of the Woolly adelgid more possible. You see this out West with the oak borers that can now survive the winters because it’s warmer. These are insects that are just killing off vast stands of trees. You know, they’re like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, rather than a black and white sort of explanation. 

1:02:33  DIFFERENT KINDS OF ROCKS

So that experience at Greenbrook really opened my eyes up a lot to not only different considerations of the mushroom species that we would be looking at, but also, you know, the geological underpinnings. We live in a really interesting geological area here in New York City area because we have that sill that is the sandstone bed. Across the Hudson, you have a tongue of the Appalachians that comes down. So it’s a completely different kind of rock. You have the mica schist and so forth. If you look at say Inwood Hill and Palisades, on the face of it, they look more or less the same. You have these sheer cliffs there basically, but they are different geological formations.

The mainland burroughs — so you have the Bronx is basically the mainland — is geologically very different from the islands. Manhattan for all intents and purposes is part of the mainland. But the other boroughs, Queens and Brooklyn, are on Long Island. And Staten Island is by itself out there in the harbor. Long Island itself is a terminal moraine that delimits the progress of the glaciers and where the glaciers dropped a lot of sediment, which is the sand that forms the beaches and so forth of Long Island and up through Cape Cod, Nantucket, and so forth. So we see very similar conditions there but a very different geology. You know, if you’re in Inwood or you’re up in Van Cortlandt Park, the soils aren’t so sandy, as those that you find out in Staten Island where we spend a lot of time. Out there, we see sinkholes, kettle ponds, and then as you’re out towards the beach, it’s just a whole different kind of environment out there. And the mushrooms are very different and the trees are very different. Your adventures into the various parks bring different kinds of mushrooms that you wouldn’t be finding in the Catskills, for example, you know, just a whole different kind of mycological flora.

1:05:32  ENDING

As John Cage said, you know, the mushrooms are continually surprising.

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