In William Turner’s “Grete Herbal” (1576), the first popular, English-language guide to the vegetable kingdom, the botanist was blunt on the matter of mushroom taxonomy. There were, he reckoned, just two kinds: “one maner is dedly and sleeth them that eateth of them and be called tode stoles, the other doeth not.” Two centuries on, scientists were no wiser about the lives of these mysterious organisms that haunted the shadows and seemed to appear by spontaneous generation. Otto von Münchhausen (1716-74)—a real scientist, but with the same fervid imagination as his tale-telling namesake—had seen fungal spores but testified that he had witnessed them hatching into small insects. Mushrooms weren’t plants, he concluded, but the dwelling places of small animals.
![[MUSHROOMS1]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AE749_MUSHRO_DV_20111028024400.jpg)
The irony is that his wishful observation and skewed reasoning were halfway right. As Eugenia Bone notes in her engaging trawl through the labyrinths of mycophilia (“From the Greek, myco = fungus, philos = loving”), fungi are no longer regarded as plants. They’re now allocated to a kingdom of their own, which, in evolutionary terms, is more closely allied to the animal world. Fungal species outnumber plants by a ratio of 6 to 1. They make up a quarter of the Earth’s biomass, occurring on every surface and in, or attached to, every other living organism. The planet’s life-systems would close down without fungis’ ceaseless involvement as digesters, recyclers, biochemical enablers and a kind of exterior immune system for their hosts.
