Misidentifying mushrooms can have fatal results

I RECEIVED an attractive book, Irish Wild Plants: Myths, Legends, Folklore by Niall MacCoitir from Collins Press last week.

Collins Press is a distinctive, Irish-owned house, based in our second city. It has done the nation a valuable service in publishing numerous titles on Ireland, its people, folklore and nature. High quality of presentation and information are the hallmarks of its list.

I have reviewed various Collins Press titles over the years. Kerry, a Natural History by Terry Carruthers, was especially memorable. Other valuable additions to my bookshelves, frequently consulted and enjoyed, include the impressive Ireland’s Coastline by Richard Nairn; The Islands of Ireland by Alex Ritsema; Wild Plants of the Burren, by Charles Nelson; Pilcher & Hall’s Flora Hibernica and Kevin Dwyer’s book of Ireland’s inland waterways, The Inner Island.

Lewis’ Cork, extracted from The Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 1837 and introduced by Tim Cadogan, was invaluable when I was researching a series of West Cork walk books, and The Way That I Went, a reprint of the autobiography of a doyen of Irish natural history, Robert Lloyd Praeger, was an inspiration, as are the works and the marvellous prose of the man himself. In books such as Beyond Soundings, relating trips to the Irish islands, his fine writing reminds me of essays from Seton Gordon’s Scotland, a recent anthology of the writings of that great Scottish naturalist, a book of whose I found, devoured and digested as a child.

Meanwhile, Irish Wild Plants: Myths, Legends, Folklore provides all that it claims on the cover. It is informative, well written, erudite in its scholarship, wide-ranging in its references, thorough in its bibliography, expert and accurate in its colour and black and white illustrations (special mention: Grania Langrishe).

I have however, one small quarrel with it, as with the last volume I received from Collins. It is to do with captioning. The case in point was a small disappointment in an otherwise fine book.

A delicate black-and-white drawing of Amanita muscaria, the Fly Agaric mushroom — or its close relative, Amanita pantherina (one needs to see the colour to know) — is labelled Stinkhorn Fungus.

The Latin name for the Stinkhorn Fungus is Phallus impudicus, because it looks like an impudent phallus, pure white and of similar proportions, sticking up out of the ground-ivy on the forest floor. The mushrooms pictured have broad, flat caps, similar to Chinese coolie hats, and I can’t say (without being an expert) I’ve ever seen a phallus that looks like that. It is an unfortunate rather than a dangerous oversight; misidentifying mushrooms can have fatal results.

Fly Agaric is dangerous, even deadly, although some aficionados claim that imbibing it brings one closer to God. The Vikings apparently thought it brought them closer to the Fiend and ate it before setting out on raids so that they would go berserk. Presumably, they survived the mushrooms, although their unfortunate victims rarely survived the raids. As for Amanita pantherina, it is lethal.

The other Collins book I refer too, The Fertile Rock, by Carsten Kreiger, was published earlier this year. It is a striking and original treatise on the Burren, full of glorious and evocative photographs. I was ready to review it in an effusive light when I saw that, in an excellent picture of a woodland floor, the flowers, which were clearly Ramsons (as most ramblers will immediately recognise) were labelled Triquetrous Garlic, the white, bluebell-like flower we see nodding on the roadside verges in March. Such blunders make authors and illustrators want to strangle layout artists and/or proof readers (I assume that neither Carsten, Niall or Grania were responsible for the errors themselves!)

Happily, no serious harm was done and for the two wrong captions I cite, there were dozens of correct ones. However, as a caveat, I would refer publishers to a classic case of a possible fatal example of mis-captioning.

In a Kingfisher book, Mushrooms and Toadstools by Derek Reid, published in 1980 and, hopefully, long since pulped, a description of a Lepiota procera, the parasol mushroom, a safe and delicious species, has an illustration of a deadly Lepiota cristata attached. As a friend once remarked, “Some mushrooms you’ll only eat once and never again ...”

However, lest the pot should be calling the kettle black, let me say that, last week, some readers asked me if the bird pictured preparing for migration was really a swallow. I took a look and I can say, with confidence, that it certainty isn’t an eagle or an owl.

*Irish Wild Plants: Myths,

Legends, Folklore

Collins Press, €25