By Dave Layton
Three states have state mushrooms including Texas of all places. Lots of folks believe that if Texas can have a state mushroom any state could, so now the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) is promoting state mushrooms for all fifty states. Hold on – even Iowa!? – home to the most altered landscape in North America? To be sure we have parks and wildlife preserves where many kinds of mushrooms flourish, but a state mushroom should be one that can be found all over the state. There aren’t many mushrooms growing in corn and beans.
There were snickers at the NAMA board meeting when one of two Iowans on the call mentioned corn smut as a possible state mushroom. I thought, if only that were possible, for if Iowa really had corn smut as a state fungus, it would mean our farming practices that now depend on herbicides, pesticides and fungicides would be more natural, and maybe corn smut itself would be seen as a valuable cash crop (it is a delicacy in some places). Yes corn smut could boost Iowa’s economy, but that’s not likely. Lets face it; ninety-nine out of a hundred Iowans consider corn smut disgusting and vile. “Me too,” said my wife Sally, upon proofreading the last sentence. She proved that Iowans, even one who eats a lot of wild mushrooms, would never vote for corn smut as a state mushroom.
No, Iowa needs a mushroom that reflects Iowa’s people – plain and simple, independent and resilient but sometimes with a tough and knotted nature. Wait! Knotted reminds me of knothole. That’s it! The knothole mushroom (Hypsizygus ulmarius) is the perfect state mushroom of Iowa. It’s plain but elegant. Plus it’s edible and growing in virtually every patch of scrub woods in every county in Iowa. It’s a simple yet picturesque fungal delight emerging from the gnarliest of trees, box elder. Actually box elder is a member of the maple family. Box elders provide so much more than the hated piles of red box elder bugs infesting the homes of everyone who owns them. Box elder is a large portion of the remaining habitat for a host of life along creek banks, old fencerows, and ditches – any place that has escaped modern farming practices.
Actually several species of edible fungi can be found on box elder at different times, but the knot hole mushroom is the epitome of all mushrooms in its perfect shape, robust size and ivory colored caps. I like cooking it with other mushrooms because it keeps a light color and firm, but tender texture when cooked.
Large older mushrooms that are too high in the trees for even a fool like me to climb up after remain impressive throughout the fall until they blend in with a barren Iowa winter landscape. The knothole mushroom’s basic functional simplicity of design is an excellent metaphor for the simple productive lifestyles that formed Iowans’ values over the last two centuries.
I got it! We’ll market it as the Iowa Values Mushroom. Our legislators talk a lot about values. Maybe they’d vote for the Iowa Values mushroom to be our state fungus. Knothole mushrooms have one other big plus. They’ll be the easiest mushrooms in the world for six and seven year-olds to draw pictures of when they lead our “Knotholes for State Mushroom” lobbying campaign.
However, we will have to squelch the falsehoods and misleading representations of this innocent fungus. You see, it’s often commonly referred to as the elm tree oyster but that’s just plain wrong. These are definitely not oyster mushrooms, and in Iowa they’re seldom found on elm. They’re almost always found growing on box elder, which is as ubiquitous as it is rugged and gnarly. Rugged and gnarly – qualities you’d be likely to find among folks living anywhere in the state. I can imagine the slogan now “The knothole mushroom … simple functional beauty growing from a rugged source, just like the people of Iowa – the Iowa Values Mushroom.” We Iowans need to get on this now, because I think the knothole mushroom might be the best choice for South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma too.
