burn the witch

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"What's in a name? That which we call a stinkhorn by any other name would still smell as rank." To paraphrase the Bard.

This living thing — and fungi are neither plant nor animal — has been around for thousands of years. Then someone came along and gave it a dubious Latin name and its troubles began.

I received another nature curiosity from Amy Barton, who had to apologize in advance for the unfortunate connotation that some would attach to its Latin name: Phallus impudicus, a.k.a. "stinkhorn."

Amy found the curious fungi growing in her backyard last October. It "hadn't reached full 'stinkiness.' They smelled like a roasted portobello mushroom."

Because of the name we had giving it, parts of proper society wanted to irradiate it from the English countryside. Amy also sent her most favorite tidbit: the musing of Charles Darwin's granddaughter.

Writing about life in Victorian Cambridge, Gwen Raverat (granddaughter of Charles Darwin) describes the "sport" of stinkhorn hunting:

"In our native woods there grows a kind of toadstool, called in the vernacular The Stinkhorn, though in Latin it bears a grosser name. The name is justified, for the fungus can be hunted by the scent alone; and this was Aunt Etty's great invention. Armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing special hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way round the wood, pausing here and there, her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at last, with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and poke his putrid carcass into her basket. At the end of the day's sport, the catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids."

Let's burn the witch, even if it's not a witch.

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