A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
dead man’s foot
Dead man’s foot is Pisolithus, a fungus that comes up out of hard bare ground as a swollen brown club, sometimes a foot tall, often looking like something buried and only partly exposed. Cut it open and the inside is packed with small pea-shaped chambers in yellow, black, and rust, each holding spores. As it matures, the whole thing collapses into a mass of cinnamon dust that blows away.
Etymology
The English name comes from what it looks like coming up through gravel at the edge of a road. It also carries a second name, dyemaker’s puffball, from a long history of use. Boiled, it gives wool a deep gold-brown that needs no mordant, and it has been used for that in several countries independently. The Latin means pea-stone, from the chambers inside.
Notes
It is one of the most widely used fungi in forestry. Pisolithus partners with the roots of pines, oaks, and eucalyptus and helps them establish on poor, disturbed, or mine-spoil ground, so nursery stock is deliberately inoculated with it before planting. It fruits in some of the least promising places anywhere, including roadcuts, parking lot edges, and bare desert gravel.