A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
morel
A morel is a spring mushroom with a hollow stem and a hollow conical head deeply pitted with ridges and hollows, like a honeycomb or a sponge. The pits are the spore surface. It fruits for a few weeks in spring, often in disturbed ground, along riverbanks, in old orchards, near dying elms, and in enormous numbers on ground that burned the previous summer. It cannot reliably be cultivated.
Etymology
The word came into English from French, and the French from a Germanic word for a dark or brown thing, related to the word behind English moor and the color name morello. So the mushroom is named simply for being dark.
Notes
Fire is the basis of a commercial harvest across the western United States and Canada, where pickers follow the previous year’s burns. Why they fruit so heavily after fire isn’t fully known. It might be that morels switch to a survival strategy and bet it all on reproduction.