The Urban Pantheist

A Big Important Inspection is happening soon, so we're cleaning places that haven't had much attention lately. My volunteer and I raked behind the zoo hospital to get rid of some debris when I came across this wonderful sight!


This is the biggest bloom of dead man's fingers I've seen in a long while. These are produced by the fungus Xylaria polymorpha. This is the first time I've seen them growing from the stump of this Ailanthus tree.


In the same area I found this lawn chair, unused by humans for some time, but clearly important to some squirrel. A gray squirrel or perhaps a chipmunk has been perching on the chair opening red oak acorns for months but in the past few days has found a new treasure. The red tubes on this bolete mushroom are an indication that humans should avoid eating it, but the rodent didn't get the memo and took a few bites.

This dead man's fingers fungus (Xylaria polymorpha) emerged from the well around a basement window. This revealed to us the presence of an old stump. Strange place for a tree to grow.

Dead man's fingers is a wood-digesting fungus that is variable in appearance (thus the scientific name). The fruiting bodies are always thick and more or less finger-like, sometimes fused into a hand-like group, sometimes separate and more elongated. This time of year the mushroom is coated with blue-green asexual spores (conidia). They persist through the summer into fall, developing sexually produced spores as well.

Dead man's fingers appeared in this blog previously as 365 urban species #181.

Photo by cottonmanifesto. Location: Olmsted park, Boston.

Urban species #181: Dead man's fingers Xylaria polymorpha

I've said it before, but the diversity of fungi is really something to behold. And as more research is done, and more molecular information is obtained, more diversity reveals itself. Dead man's fingers, a species of wood-digesting fungus that produces a variety of different dull-colored club-like fruiting bodies, is most likely not a single species. Future naturalists and field guides will differentiate narrower fingers and wider fingers, and between fruiting bodies that are grayer, greener, or blacker than others. Or perhaps the separate species may be divided by more esoteric or hard to notice features. For now, what we call Xylaria polymorpha is a complex of related fungi, grouped under a single name. The fruiting bodies appear on dead wood in late spring, persisting into the fall, very slowly and gradually releasing spores. The fungus grows on hard woods such as maple and beech, usually at ground level. Sometimes the fruiting bodies grow from buried wood, making it appear as if they are coming directly from the soil.


Photo by urbpan. Location: Ringer park, Allston.