The Urban Pantheist

What is that group of people doing, way down the concrete slope, sitting at the edge of the water?

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Hey my laptop stopped working quite suddenly a week ago!

Not to worry, I just got it back, and all it cost was the equivalent of two of the competitor's laptops. Not that I'm bitter.

Anyway, if you have missed the world of urban nature, I highly recommend you check out Your Wild City a new webcomic by Rosemary Mosco of Bird and Moon comics and Maris Wicks of Human Body Theater.

Hooray for science and nature comics!

"Warm" meaning "above 32F."


A non-native invasive species, but a source of color at the black chain-link gate. The fruit of the tomato relative bittersweet nightshade Solanum dulcamara.


Just a few feet away, the fruit of the fungus Exidia recisa, having weakened the wood of an overhead branch, has fallen with its food to the ground. There is no accepted common name for this mushroom, but I like "winter jelly" or maybe "willow jelly" since it's one of the only mushrooms common in winter, and it mostly feeds on willow branches.

You know, I said a little while ago that I should make a special website or other media project that collects all the mushrooms commonly found in human-impacted and human created ecosystems. Something like http://urbanmushrooms.com/ which, as it turns out, already exists. It's not perfect (found some obsolete synonyms in use there) but it is exactly what I was thinking of doing. Not that I can't do the same thing in my own style, but I thought you should know it's there.


So, speaking of which, here is a mushroom found only indoors--at least in temperate zones. This is a tropical species, Leucocoprinus birnbaumii which has found its way into the highly fragmented yet consistent ecosystem of greenhouses and house plants. This fruiting appeared in one of the planters in the Tropical Forest exhibit at Franklin Park Zoo (in a place not visible to the public nor accessible by the animals, in the giant anteater exhibit). A zookeeper friend (perhaps one seen here earlier, pointing her lips at a beetle grub) brought it to my attention, as I am becoming known as "the mushroom guy" around work.

As luck would have it, I had seen photos of the mushroom online the week before--a gardener found it in his potted pepper plant and was posting it concerned that it would harm his peppers or transfers poisons to them. (By the way, the answer is no to both. Mushrooms coming from the soil near a plant are almost always beneficial or neutral to the plant--parasites usually grow directly from the visible plant tissue. Poisonous mushrooms don't imbue their neighbors with poisonous essence--if anything, they are more likely to remove poisons from the nearby soil.)

This fascinating adaptation to the great indoors is paralleled by many small tropical animal species as well as tropical microbes. There are studies being done as we speak comparing the indoor wildlife of households in different parts of the world. I look forward to seeing the results of these studies--what do we all share, what's unique to one place or another. This mushroom is one of only two mushrooms I am aware of that is primarily found indoors, at least through much of its range.


A freshly emerged Leucocoprinus button. Common names for this mushroom boil down to some combination of "yellow," "potted plant," and "parasol."

This mushroom is dainty and beautiful, and resembles mushrooms in the Coprinus group, most of which are edible. This species is not edible to humans, causing some gastric distress. Its edibility to anteaters is not known to be, but fortunately they were growing out of his reach.

Morning glory.

Honey locusts.

Urban Harvest Moon.


Earlier that evening in Boston.

Horsenettle fruits.