A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
chicken of the woods
Chicken of the woods is Laetiporus, a bracket fungus that grows in overlapping shelves off standing trunks and stumps in sulfur yellow and orange. A bank of it can run three feet across and is bright enough to spot from the far side of a wood. Young, the flesh is soft and moist and cuts like a firm breast of meat. It fruits from the same tree for years.
Etymology
The English name describes the eating rather than the looking, which very few common names do. The Latin describes the color. Laetiporus means bright-pored, and laetus, the bright half of it, is the same word behind the name Letitia. The older scientific name was Polyporus sulphureus, which is where the other common name, sulfur shelf, comes from.
Notes
It causes brown rot in heartwood, so the tree keeps standing while the inside goes. That is one reason old oaks develop the hollow trunks that bats, owls, and beetles move into. Not everyone tolerates it, and specimens off eucalyptus, conifers, and locust are best left alone.