A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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witch’s butter
Witch’s butter is a jelly fungus that grows on dead hardwood as a lobed, folded, gelatinous mass in bright orange-yellow, looking like something spilled on the branch. It shrivels to a hard dark crust in dry weather and swells back to full size within hours of rain, which it can do repeatedly for months. The same name is also used for a black jelly fungus that behaves the same way.
Etymology
The English name comes from a body of northern European folklore in which the fungus appearing on a gate or a fence was a sign that a witch had cursed the household. The remedy was to pierce it with pins so she would be forced to reveal herself. Similar stories attach to it across Scandinavia and Germany.