A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
black trumpet
Craterellus cornucopioides, a thin-fleshed funnel of a mushroom, grey-black to charcoal, hollow all the way down, growing in troops on the forest floor under beech and oak. It is famously hard to see — the color is exactly right for shadowed leaf litter — and once you find one you generally find fifty. Dried, it concentrates into something closer to a spice than a vegetable.
Etymology
The English name is descriptive and the Latin is generous: Craterellus is a little crater, Greek kratēr, the bowl wine was mixed in, and cornucopioides means shaped like a cornucopia, the horn of plenty. So the botanical name reads as a horn of abundance. The French common name goes the opposite direction — trompette de la mort, trumpet of the dead, for the color and for its habit of fruiting around All Saints’. One mushroom, named both for a horn of plenty and for the last trumpet, depending on who was looking at it.