Mushrooms In Children’s Illustration

All mushrooms are edible. Some only once.

Lithuanian proverb

In this episode of Talk Nerdy, Cara is joined by Dr. Lawrence Millman, world-renowned mycologist and author of “Fungipedia: A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore.” They talk about his fascinating journey from Ph.D. in English Literature to explorer and ethnographer to global expert on fungi. And of course, there’s a ton of mushroom talk.

I live in a part of the world where deadly poisonous mushrooms grow rampantly under certain conditions. The Amanita phalloides is also known as the Deathcap mushroom.

https://twitter.com/DocOnSkis/status/1249876091516227584

Unfortunately, these deadly poisonous mushrooms look very similar to tasty and nutritious mushrooms that grow in other parts of the world, for example Asia’s popular straw mushroom.

In 2012, two people died after eating these mushrooms at a New Year’s Eve dinner party in Canberra, and in 2014 four people were seriously poisoned.

Food Safety News

Death by poisonous mushroom must be a harrowing way to go, because you don’t die immediately. Rather, you feel worse and worse, and no doubt realise at some point that you have eaten a deathcap. However, by the time you start to feel ill, it is too late.

Emily Dickinson’s Poem About Mushrooms

Art by Jane Newland for Emily Dickinson's poem about mushrooms
Art by Jane Newland for Emily Dickinson’s poem about mushrooms

The Mushroom

By Emily Dickinson

The mushroom is the elf of plants,
At evening it is not;
At morning in a truffled hut
It stops upon a spot.

As if it tarried always;
And yet its whole career
Is shorter than a snake’s delay,
And fleeter than a tare.’

T is vegetation’s juggler,
The germ of alibi;
Doth like a bubble antedate,
And like a bubble hie.

I feel as if the grass were pleased
To have it intermit;
The surreptitious scion
Of summer’s circumspect.

Had nature any outcast face,
Could she a son contemn,
Had nature an Iscariot,
That mushroom, — it is him.

Mushrooms in Hayao Miyazaki Films

Food is important to Hayao Miyazaki, and mushrooms are an important part of Japanese cuisine, so naturally mushrooms feature heavily in his animated films.

Mushroom Men

Witch with mushroom men' by Austrian painter and graphic artist Franz Wacik (1883-1938)
Witch with mushroom men’ by Austrian painter and graphic artist Franz Wacik (1883-1938)
Make and Make-Believe by Arthur I. Gates and Miriam Blanton Huber, Macmillan, 1931 mushroom
Make and Make-Believe by Arthur I. Gates and Miriam Blanton Huber, Macmillan, 1931
Little Nemo- Dream Another Dream by Yuko Shimizu, a tribute to Windsor McKay (Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905 to 1914)
Little Nemo- Dream Another Dream by Yuko Shimizu, a tribute to Windsor McKay (Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905 to 1914)
Tove Jansson’s rare illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, 1966
Edwin John Prittie illustration for Bumper The White Rabbit by George Ethelbert Walsh, 1922
David Hall’s conceptual art for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, 1939
Richard Doyle 1870
Eric Kincaid’s Alice In Wonderland
Nadir Quinto (1918 ~ 1994) 1958 illustration for ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ by J.M. Barrie

Mushroom and Toadstool Shade Umbrellas

Cafe In The Wood Fritz Baumgarten (German, 1883-1966)
“Back Home After Travels” by Fritz Baumgarten (1883-1966)
Fritz Baumgarten. 1883-1966
Ray Harryhausen (1920 - 2013) 1961 unused illustration for "Mysterious Island" by Cy Endfield
Ray Harryhausen (1920 – 2013) 1961 unused illustration for “Mysterious Island” by Cy Endfield
illustration by Leon Carre, (1878-1942) for the 1924 edition of 'Au Jardin Des Gemmes' (In the Garden of Gems) by Leonard Rosenthal
illustration by Leon Carre, (1878-1942) for the 1924 edition of ‘Au Jardin Des Gemmes’ (In the Garden of Gems) by Leonard Rosenthal
"Travelers" by Petro Kozlanyuk Illustrator Ivan Kryslach mushroom
“Travelers” by Petro Kozlanyuk Illustrator Ivan Kryslach
Mushroom by Victor Hugo 1850
Mushroom by Victor Hugo 1850
Mother Mushroom with her children, ca.1900 by Edward Okuń
by Margaret Tarrant
1975 THE WITCH’S HAT Irwin Dermer ILLUSTRATED Tony Meeuwissen
illustration for the letters E & F from the book Fairyland ABC written by Grace Floyd 1890
Ocke, Nutta och Pillerill, Elsa Beskow 1939
Hier wohnt das Glück, Happiness dwells here in Austrian by Ida Bohatta-Morpurgo
Elsa Beskow
Gyo Fujikawa mushroom
Gyo Fujikawa mushroom
Yelena Polenova - Illustration for the fairy tale War of the Mushrooms (1889)
Yelena Polenova – Illustration for the fairy tale War of the Mushrooms (1889)
Madison Safer owl with mushrooms
Madison Safer
JUFFROUW SPITS OP REIS [c. 1948] Piet Broos
JUFFROUW SPITS OP REIS [c. 1948] Piet Broos
German artist Martin Wiegand 1867-1961 gnomes meeting a grasshopper mushroom
German artist Martin Wiegand 1867-1961
The Toast by British children's illustrator Angus Clifford Racey Helps, who uses a mushroom as a table.
The Toast by British children’s illustrator Angus Clifford Racey Helps, who uses a mushroom as a table.
H. Eichhorn, in Die Pflanzenwelt [The Plant World] by Otto Warburg. Published 1913 by Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig
H. Eichhorn, in Die Pflanzenwelt [The Plant World] by Otto Warburg. Published 1913 by Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig
Signe Aspelin (1881-1961) Småttingarnas svampbok (Tales of the Mushroom Folk), 1909
from the Truffle entry at Wikipedia
from the Truffle entry at Wikipedia
THE MUSHROOM AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Shalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and the research of Sam Solomon and Natalia Cecire. Modernist mushrooms, if they are a thing, exist in the writings of Alfred Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes, and Sylvia Plath, and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz.

Shalini is a final year PhD student at the University of Sussex, UK. Her thesis explores the concept of modernist difficulty in British and diasporic poetry through the lens of intersectionality. Her academic writings have appeared/are forthcoming in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. In 2021, she was selected as a Ledbury Emerging Critic.

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Header illustration: ‘Periwinkle Painting the Petals’, by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite 1923

CONTEMPORARY FICTION SET IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND (2023)

On paper, things look fine. Sam Dennon recently inherited significant wealth from his uncle. As a respected architect, Sam spends his days thinking about the family needs and rich lives of his clients. But privately? Even his enduring love of amateur astronomy is on the wane. Sam has built a sustainable-architecture display home for himself but hasn’t yet moved into it, preferring to sleep in his cocoon of a campervan. Although they never announced it publicly, Sam’s wife and business partner ended their marriage years ago due to lack of intimacy, leaving Sam with the sense he is irreparably broken.

Now his beloved uncle has died. An intensifying fear manifests as health anxiety, with night terrors from a half-remembered early childhood event. To assuage the loneliness, Sam embarks on a Personal Happiness Project:

1. Get a pet dog

2. Find a friend. Just one. Not too intense.

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