A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
foxfire
Foxfire is the pale green light given off by fungi growing in decaying wood. It comes from the mycelium threaded through the log rather than from any mushroom, so what glows is a piece of rotten timber, faintly and steadily, bright enough on a truly dark night to read by at close range and invisible in any other conditions. Around forty species of fungus are known to do it.
Etymology
The first half is probably not the animal. The usual explanation is that it comes from an old French word meaning false, which came into English attached to several things that resemble something they are not, so foxfire is false fire. English also calls it will-o’-the-wisp, though that name belongs more properly to the marsh lights, and the older term is fox-fire written with a hyphen. The Latin name for the effect is bioluminescence.
Notes
Aristotle recorded a cold light coming from wood. Benjamin Franklin proposed using foxfire to light the compass of the first American submarine, the Turtle, in 1775. Soldiers in the trenches of the First World War reported it in the timber shoring. The Foxfire books, a series compiled from the 1960s by high school students in Appalachia recording the skills of their elders, took the name because the light is faint, local, and easy to miss.