A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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devil’s fingers
Devil’s fingers is Clathrus archeri, a stinkhorn that begins as a white egg half-buried in leaf litter and then splits open and unfolds four to seven scarlet arms, which arch back until the whole thing sits like a small red hand or a starfish on the ground. The upper surfaces of the arms are coated in a dark slime that smells strongly of rotting meat. The whole performance takes a few hours.
Etymology
The English name is one of several the fungus has collected, alongside octopus stinkhorn, which is the more common one and describes the arms better. Stinkhorn is a straightforward English compound and the older word, and the group’s Latin family name means shameless, which the Victorians who wrote most of the field guides applied with some feeling. Clathrus means a lattice or a cage, for the related species that come up as a hollow red ball of struts.
Notes
The smell is the whole strategy. Stinkhorns do not release spores into the wind; they mix them into slime, attract flies, and let the flies carry them off, so the fungus is pollinated in reverse. This species is native to Australia and New Zealand and arrived in Europe in the early twentieth century, apparently in imported wool or military supplies, and has spread across the continent since.