Chantrelles, Osmanthus, and Other Olfactory Twins

Mushroom picking, more than any other foraging, is serious business. Before putting anything in one’s mouth, or doing any collection for eating, a picker learns each mushroom one at a time. What do the gills look like? how do they join the stem? What is the colour range? Is there a distinct gill print? How do look alike species differ? Is there anything else remarkable about the species? When the mushroom is learned, a picker often develops a shorthand crosscheck to ‘proof’ a species. Hedgehog mushrooms, for instance, have distinctive icicle shaped gills.  Chicken-of-the-Woods only grow on dead wood. I have picked a good number of mushrooms, but my favorite has always been the golden chanterelle.  While it is a distinctive species, I am a cautious picker. My two checks are gills connected to stem and scent. If the scent is not there, I don’t eat the mushrooms. After picking, the scent does fade, to it also becomes a good means of checking age in store bought mushrooms. When I learned how to pick, the telltale scent of chanterelles was described to me as sweet apricots  or floral apricots. Neither was quite accurate, as the scent was fruity yet lacked a sugar backing. The instant I smelled a pure osmanthus absolute, I had a new referent. Chanterelle mushrooms smell like osmanthus extract. And it is one of the most beautiful scents in the world.

Native Plants: Skunk Cabbage

Confession: I love skunk cabbage. You’ll never trust me again, will you, dear reader?  Skunk Cabbage is so much more beautiful than its name. A traditional famine food of usually well-provisioned coastal peoples, the heady and enormous yellow flowers are a feast of colour in early spring forest. It’s skunky, yes, but not in an animalistic way. It’s skunky like beautiful oil rich plants are skunky.  I associate it with spring and early summer, cool dark places, and red cedar forests.

Native Plants: Salmonberry (Flowering Stage)

Salmonberries are delicious herbal, delicate, and sweet caviar-like berries which appear in the early to mid summer all down the coast of BC. They can be juiced, jellied, tinctured, brewed, and baked, but all of that is for later.

Now, in early spring, we have the delicate crepe-paper flowers. These are some of the first hints of brightness in the bushes along trails and roadsides.