Forests and fields, yards and crop acreage, too, are beginning to sport a few unusual combinations of mushrooms growing inside other fungi, others invading plant parts and causing some grotesque outcomes.
Insects, bacteria, and viruses do similar things to plants and some animals.
We generally know little about these and may not recognize them for what they are or if they are useful or dangerous to the host or to us as observers.
Some combinations grow are more normal and upon additional examinations that find they are simply immature states of buds, flowers, fruits, and tendrils, vines, and spines that belong where they appear.
Black cherry is well known, if we notice, for large galls on branches, even trunks. Those who work with lathes and wood know their value, to the point that portions of these trees have been stolen and sold to woodworkers. Suspecting wardens and investigators have made cases by matching a black cherry gall with a specific tree on private property.
Goldenrod galls show as enlargements of this plant’s stem; the grub inside matures into an insect if a bird doesn’t find it first or by an ice fisherman looking for emergency bluegill bait.
Hazelnut fruits first appear as resembling a leafy gall than an early edible nut for us and animals small enough to climb the whimsy stems and cut the fruit free before going to the ground to feed.
Several golf ball facsimiles appear to have become stuck in the crotches of shrubs or trees. Oak galls are white and the right size to belong on a fairway if it weren’t for the evenly spaced reddish dots.
This is all the work of a tiny wasp and the oak tree’s response to having an egg laid where it can grow.
The start of a hornet nest is about the size, but not the texture, of a golf ball.
Lobsters of the woods? One mushroom fungus invades and grows inside a completely different fungus resulting in a lobster mushroom, quite edible, and red on the outside and white inside, just like a lobster on a plate.
Rust is good name for fungi that produce oodles of tiny, reddish, dust-like spores. Most plants have these infections and the names almost always have rust as part of it. Cedar-apple rust, once getting to know it, says it all. This fungus infects red cedar trees, produces an orange gall with gelatinous tentacles, and then jumps to an apple tree to finish its cycle.
Another rust hits the very common mayapple’s leaves. Corn smut is a rust-like disease even though the name and appearance are quite grotesque. This rust, corn smut, is edible, even sold in a can.
Others things are quite normal, albeit grotesque, like the red latex in the bloodroot plant. Face paint anyone?
A Baltimore oriole’s swinging nest started with the hen striping tough strands from dead lowland stems that serve as thread to swing the bird’s cradle.
Sumac stems are infected by a fungus and develop into banana-like structures but they cannot be pealed for a woodland snack.
Some hitchhiking plant fruits and seeds would never be thought to be the fruits and seeds of the next generation of burdock and stickseeds.
Even the beautiful lady’s-slipper orchid shows little resemblance to a flower, but more like an inflated slipper that fools even a pollinator who comes to gather nectar, pollen, and sometimes leaves having gone through a torturous ordeal.
Noticing these growths adds to the notion that organisms rarely grow alone and are sometimes transformed into wild-looking misunderstandings. If the cause is host-specific, they can be used to identify the host, too, such as cedar apple rust, corn smut and goldenrod gall only grow on cedars, corn and goldenrods.
— Jerry Davis is an Argyle native and a freelance writer who lives in Barneveld. He can be reached at sivadjam@mhtc.net or at 608-924-1112.
