Dorothy Beebee

All of a sudden, everything is coming up mushrooms
Dorothy Beebee (SOMA Newsletter, December 2004)

Faster than I can keep up with them, they are starting to arrive, in person and in spirit. The best experience of all of this was the special reception recently given to Miriam C. Rice at the Ford House in Mendocino to honor the 30th anniversary of her little groundbreaking book, Let’s Try Mushrooms for Color, published in 1974 by Thresh Publications in Santa Rosa. Friends, colleagues, and former students from near and far came to honor Miriam and her remarkable work. Decorating the rooms were the display panels from the original “Traveling Mushroom Dye Exhibit” from the Mendocino County Museum in Willits, and Miriam was honored by the presence of the original curator of that exhibit, Herbert Pruitt, who designed and executed it in 1976.

Also present was Dr. Susan Libonati-Barnes, who with Dr. Daniel Stuntz, had first identified Miriam’s “mysterious mushroom” belonging to the Cortinarius (Dermocybe) genus. This was the first mushroom to produce the rose/ red dyes we all coveted and is now picked as widely as Scandinavia to Australia, and to which many recent mushroom books now refer to as “the dye corts”. (You all know that story by now, of how the remnants of that cooked mushroom was scraped off the side of the dyepot and sent to the University of Washington to be examined under the microscope, and identified by the shape of its spores…)

This event was part of the Annual Wine and Mushroom Festival in Mendocino, and as usual a good part of the “show and tell” was courtesy of SOMA volunteers, who on Saturday did a whole afternoon of presentations on mushroom cooking, dyes, papermaking, and medicinals. Fortunately, we had a few fine specimens of Phaeolus schweinitzii (“dyers polypore”), and a splendid Pholiota (=Gymnopilus) spectablis (“Laughing Gym”) from the Bishop pine forests near Mendocino to demonstrate the dye process producing beautiful yellow and gold on skeins of wool.

These same two large fungi also abundantly graced our baskets at the SOMA Foray held on Saturday, November 20th, 2004 on a sparkling Salt Point Day gathering of 70+ SOMA and CNPS foragers. Plus one Dermocybe sp. (possibly D. crocea)! Miriam always says that if the boletes are out, the Dermocybes can’t be far behind! Also collected for the dyepot were a few Gomphus flucossus (which gives a lovely lavender with iron mordant), Pholiota (=Naemataloma) fasciculare which was the first mushroom sp. that Miriam ever experimented with back in 1968 for bright yellow dye.

Another mushroom to be on the lookout for are those in the toothed Hydnellum and Sarcodon familie — Hydnellum peckii in particular, as well as the Sarcodon fuscoindicus will produce blue green dyes with some pH magic in the dye pot.


And of course, Omphalotus olivescens should be showing up at the base of old madrone or oak stumps anytime now to challenge our imagination with forest green or purple depending on whether the dye bath is acidic or alkaline. This is the season of so many exciting mushroom dye color challenges—too bad so many holidays get in the way of these projects!!!