Sense of Place

Tag: fungi

  • Three Amanitas

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    Nicolette Cagle
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    by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., August 5, 2026 Location: Durham, NC, along the Eno River The woods were warm, wet, and thick with humidity this morning. Dark and close, the trees released large, gentle drops of rain that sat patiently until a breeze brushed the canopy, releasing them to the forest floor of dense brown…

  • Flourishing Fungi: Snow Fungus

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    Nicolette Cagle
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    By Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., July 26, 2026 Location: Duke Forest, Durham, NC near New Hope Creek and Hollow Rock The humid air and moist ground had turned the world into a wonderland of the bizarre, letting loose towering white mushrooms that reached my knee, pairs of greenhouse millipedes entwined on trees, and a determined…

  • Milkcap Mushrooms

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    Nicolette Cagle
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    Recent rains means it’s Milkcap Mushroom (Lactarius sp.) season! Did you know that North Carolina has an unusually important history of milkcap research? UNC mycologist William Chambers Coker published The Lactarias of North Carolina in 1918. A later assessment of the UNC Herbarium reported 456 milkcap specimens representing 76 species, and 355 of those specimens…

  • Unwrapping the Box: Seeds, Spores, and the Forest Inside the Turtle

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    Nicolette Cagle
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    by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., May 26, 2026 In the last post, we began a new part of this Eastern Box Turtle series by considering the turtle’s gifts. In Western science, many of these gifts are described as ecosystem services, or the useful work a species does in a larger ecological system. That language can…

  • What Happens to a Nut on the Forest Floor?

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    Nicolette Cagle
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    by Nicolette L. Cagle, June 1, 2026 What happens to a hickory nut or walnut after it falls to the forest floor? At first, it can seem like a simple thing, a stored future released from the canopy and left beneath the tree that made it. Imagine a hickory nut resting inside its husk, a…

  • European Beech: The Tree That Shapes the Atmosphere of Central Europe’s Uplands

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    Nicolette Cagle
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    by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., March 29, 2026 In the last few posts, I introduced this Central Europe tree series by reflecting on why trees are such a powerful way into sense of place, then by sketching the mountain forests of Central Europe, and most recently by looking more closely at Sycamore Maple, one of…

  • Fruiting Fungi & Woody Plants in the Piedmont

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    Nicolette Cagle
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    When we explore the Piedmont woods, our attention sometimes shifts away from the showy flowers, stately trees, and singing birds to the diminutive mushrooms around us. Many of these mushrooms have key and important associations with the woody plants that so often structure our definitions of ecosystems.  Fungi & Oaks. In the Piedmont, there are…