A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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tinder fungus
The tinder fungus is Fomes fomentarius, the hard gray hoof-shaped bracket that grows on birch and beech and lasts for decades, adding a layer a year. Between the crust and the tube layers is a band of soft brown felt, and that layer, cut out, beaten thin, and treated, is amadou: a material that takes a spark instantly and holds a slow ember for hours without flaming.
Etymology
The Latin says it twice. Fomes is Latin for tinder or kindling and the species name repeats it, so the scientific name is tinder tinder, which is a fair measure of what the fungus was for. The English hoof fungus names the shape instead, and amadou came into English from a southern French word for tinder related to the word for a lover, on the idea of something that catches quickly.
Notes
Ötzi, the man found in the ice on the Austrian-Italian border and dated to around 3300 BC, carried pieces of it with iron pyrite, which is a working fire kit. Amadou was also used as a styptic to stop bleeding and as a material for hats, which are still made in Transylvania, and a strip of it was the standard slow match before matches existed.