Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake

Fruiting bodies, such as mushrooms, arise from the felting together of hyphal strands. These organs can perform many feats besides expelling spores. Some, like truffles, produce aromas that have made them among the most expensive foods in the world. Others, like shaggy ink cap mushrooms (Coprinus comatus), can push their way through asphalt and lift heavy paving stones, although they are not themselves a tough material. Pick an ink cap and you can fry it up and eat it. Leave it in a jar, and its bright white flesh will deliquesce into a pitch-black ink over the course of a few days (the illustrations in this book were drawn with Coprinus ink).

I’ve seen this many times but it never ceases to astonish me. A solid mushroom becomes liquid. A bright white turns to a deep, obsidian black. You can almost watch it happening. The ink caps that made the ink for the illustrations in the book came from a park in Montreal. I ate a few and left a couple to deliquesce. I then sent the ink to the artist Collin Elder for him to experiment with. The ink was quite thin and to start with he layered it up in layers on the page. After a while he started concentrating it. The textures he gets are fantastic, from sharp lines to light washes. Inks are mesmerising. A friend of mine makes beautiful inks and I’m often surprised at how the colours on the page can differ radically from the colour of the raw material. Buckthorn berries, for example, are purple and make a purple ink which turns a wonderful sap green as it dries.