A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
dead man’s fingers
Three unrelated things carry this name, all of them for the same reason. In a wood it is Xylaria polymorpha, a black club-shaped fungus that pushes up out of buried hardwood in stiff swollen fingers. On the shore it is Alcyonium digitatum, a soft coral that grows on rock in fleshy white or orange lobes. And in the kitchen it is the feathery gray gills of a crab, which crab pickers set aside.
Etymology
The name is English and it is the same observation made three times by people who had no reason to compare notes. The fungus and the coral both push up in blunt jointed lobes about the size of a hand, and the crab’s gills sit under the shell where nobody expects to find anything soft and pale. The Latin for the fungus, polymorpha, means many-shaped, and it earns it, since the same species can come up as fingers, clubs, antlers, or a single blunt stump.
Notes
The fungus is a wood decayer that works on stumps and buried roots, so it appears out of apparently open ground. The soft coral is a colony of tiny polyps and swells or shrinks with the tide, so a rock that looks bare at one hour is furred with white at another. The crab gills are not toxic; they are simply where the animal filtered water and are not worth eating.