Dedham Town Forest Ramble
Yesterday I went with @WildDedham and three other hikers for a ramble in the Dedham Town Forest. Most people, including Dedhamites, have never heard of the forest, and that's kind of a nice thing. Ideally it will receive some conservation attention before it becomes well-known to the public. Since it's fairly isolated and fenced in, there's very little in the way of invasive species there. One idea is to complete the fencing to create an exclosure keeping deer out, then plant other native plants (the ones like trillium, that deer tend to graze out of existence) and preserve the place as a native forest plant sanctuary, like Garden in the Woods.
Anyway, it was a pretty amazing place, and we stayed for three hours despite some of the worst mosquito activity I've ever experienced. The mushroom hunting was the best I've ever seen.
The first unusual thing about the forest is its location: between the north and southbound lanes of RT 128/95, the major ring road that encircles the Boston metropolitan area.
After parking at a closed restaurant nearby, and crossing a busy road, we entered the forest enclosure through a chain link gate.
A ten foot wide chute leads to the forest itself.
We hiked through a field of low poison ivy then into a wonderland of fungi. This was one of six or seven kinds of mushroom I had never seen before. I don't know what this one is, but many of the others I recognized from field guides.
Recent wet weather was responsible for the prolific mushroom fruitings, and had swollen this little drainage stream to a deep trough.
There were hundreds and hundreds of clumps of coral mushrooms--mostly white, but some of these orange ones as well.
I think a lot of the fungal diversity we saw came from the fact that the leaf and needle litter in the forest hasn't been disturbed for decades. Some mushrooms were only visible as lumps pushing up the leaf litter.
I didn't see too much in the way of edible mushrooms (not that I much care about that, but I know other people only see mushrooms in terms of edibility) but there were a few of these black-staining polypores. (Meripilus sumstinei)
One clearing earned the name "the lichen field" for the massive amounts of different lichen kinds there in the relatively sunny patch. We wondered how we protect this area from foot traffic, which can be very destructive to terrestrial lichens.
This was the largest birch polypore I'd ever seen.
These beautifully patterned leaves belong to a native orchid called "rattlesnake plantain."
Six times on the ramble we saw spring peepers hopping through the woods! I stopped to catch the first three, then left the rest to go peacefully unregarded.
There were dozens of Russula mushrooms, including Russula emetica and other red ones, but a few were other colors, including this purplish one.
The climax of the walk for me was my first time seeing green stain mushroom, a pretty inadequate name for this amazingly-colored cup fungus (the scientific name is a little better: Chlorociboria aeruginascens). It's named for the green stain it imparts to wood, which used to be used for special colored inlays.
Now how did a mycorrhizal mushroom (another Russula) end up fruiting in a stone wall?
Partidgeberry is an evergreen ground cover that produces attractive red berries ("It looks like Christmas!" one of the participants remarked) and these are some of its flowers.
The ramble organizer regards her own personal Yorick, the head-bone from a young male white-tailed deer, probably killed on the highway and dragged into the woods by scavengers.
We reached an area with an access road for highway department trucks. These Coprinus mushrooms were fruiting from well-rotted wood chips.
A small wood frog broke up the amphibian monotony!
The Destroying Angel is a lovely mushroom which is best left uneaten.
Dark beauty is some of the best beauty, in my opinion.