A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
wood ear
Wood ear is Auricularia, a fungus that grows on dead and dying hardwood as a floppy translucent brown cup, wrinkled and veined and shaped like a human ear. It is gelatinous when damp and dries to a hard black scale, then swells back to full size in the next rain. Kinda gross, it sounds to me.
Etymology
The English name translates the Chinese, mu er, which means exactly that and is the name under which the fungus is sold worldwide in dried form. It is one of the oldest cultivated mushrooms in the world, with Chinese records of growing it on logs going back well over a thousand years, and it remains a staple rather than a delicacy.