A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
bear’s head
A white fungus of the genus Hericium that hangs from wounds and broken limbs on old trees in a cascade of soft downward-pointing spines, sometimes a foot across. It has no cap and no gills. The spore surface is the outside of every spine, which is a design almost nothing else uses. Cooked, it comes apart in fibers and is regularly compared to crab.
Etymology
An English name given for the shaggy, blunt-muzzled look of the whole clump on a trunk. The Latin is more precise about the texture than the shape: Hericium is from Latin ericius, hedgehog — the same root behind French hérisson and English urchin, which meant hedgehog for centuries before it meant a sea creature or a scruffy child.
Notes
It fruits from the same wound year after year, so a tree that produces one is worth remembering and returning to. It is a heart-rot fungus working inside standing wood, which is why it appears out of a scar rather than off the ground.