#rooting shank

It has been raining for a week but there was a break this morning where it was just muggy and buggy as all hell, and the forest floor was soaked to the bone and making mosquitos very happy. So naturally, I went to the deep woods to hike for three miles in search of mushrooms because I have a problem.

Thanks for sharing your cool fungi, I’m missing the woods a lot.

Although a reasonable edible, I’ve never considered rooting shanks much worth gathering unless to supplement some other foraged species, as they grow singularly, and are quite insubstantial. They were absolutely covering the woodland parts of the trail I was hiking for four days, however, in numbers I’ve never seen further north in the UK, and would have been worth picking, but unfortunately I had no way to safely transport them along the hike and home again.

These elegant fungi are common across Britain. They are edible, but not particularly desirable, and rarely found in large enough numbers to be worth collecting (additionally, this one had been taken over by a group of small insects). You are better off admiring their long, elegant, and finally grooved stem, their most recognisable feature. If you do pick them, try digging gently down around their base - they often have as long a stem below the earth as they do above, as they most commonly grow on deeply buried well-rotted wood. 

Photo credit: ©Claude-Alain Berdoz | Locality: not indicated (2014)