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.
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.
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
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)
from the book ‘Mein Skizzenbuch’, by German artist Heinz Geilfus, 1930sMake 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)
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
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 Endfieldillustration 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 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
Toadstool fairies Swiss painter, illustrator, and author, Mili Weber (1891-1978)
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 BeskowGyo Fujikawa mushroomYelena Polenova – Illustration for the fairy tale War of the Mushrooms (1889)
Madison Safer
JUFFROUW SPITS OP REIS [c. 1948] Piet BroosGerman artist Martin Wiegand 1867-1961
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
Tales of the Mushroom Folk by Signe Aspelin (1881-1961)
![JUFFROUW SPITS OP REIS [c. 1948] Piet Broos](https://www.slaphappylarry.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/JUFFROUW-SPITS-OP-REIS-c.-1948-Piet-Broos-mouse-mushroom.jpg)
![H. Eichhorn, in Die Pflanzenwelt [The Plant World] by Otto Warburg. Published 1913 by Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig](https://www.slaphappylarry.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/h-eichhorn-in-die-pflanzenwelt-the-plant-world-by-otto-warburg-published-1913-by-bibliographisches-institut-leipzig.jpg)
