By Bruce Burton
To The Haldimand Press
“There are milllions of spores in the air around us, which we inhale and exhale on a regular basis,” said City of Burlington Supervisor of Forest Planning and Health, Kyle McLoughlin, as guest speaker at the regular meeting of the Dunnville Horticultural Society on March 17, 2023.
McLoughlin was a wilderness guide specializing in edible wild plants before becoming an arborist and is therefore well qualified to talk about just that subject. In this case, he was present to talk primarily about those plants of the Order Agaricales, or mushrooms.
Although he began his talk explaining the value of trees in our environment, he quickly segued to the relationships of trees and mushrooms, with the non-cholesterol plants having a special arrangement with some trees through the tree’s roots and the mushrooms mycelium forming a symbiotic relationship.
Although there are a few members of the fungi family that are not healthy for us, and many plants to be around, there are actually dozens of types that can not only be eaten but are avidly sought around the world for their taste and rarity, such as the truffle. McLoughlin also spoke of a type of slime mold that moves in search of food. It will be on a log for instance, but, if you leave and come back in an hour, it will be somewhere else. It was definitely a presentation with a “morel”!
