A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
mycelium
Mycelium is the working body of a fungus: a network of fine threads, each one cell wide, running through soil, leaf litter, wood, or whatever the fungus is feeding on. It grows only at the tips of the threads, fuses where threads from the same organism meet, and moves water and nutrients around inside itself. A mushroom is a temporary structure the mycelium builds when it is time to release spores.
Etymology
The word is built on the Greek for fungus and a Greek word for something like a stopper or a wad, and it was coined in the nineteenth century. The individual thread is a hypha, which is Greek for a web. The whole vocabulary of fungal structure is Greek and was assembled in the space of a few decades once microscopes were good enough to see what was going on.
Notes
The quantities involved are hard to hold in the head. A teaspoon of forest soil can contain several miles of mycelium, and the mycelium of a single fungus can run across hundreds of acres. Because it fuses into a continuous system and connects to tree roots, it moves carbon and nutrients between plants, in the mycorrhizal network.