ANN ARBOR—’Tis the season. Mushroom season, that is—collecting morels, and other delectable fungi for feasting. But there is no specific season to collecting the fungi studied in the University of Michigan’s Herbarium. Nor is there any geographic area ignored.

The Herbarium, established in 1921, includes some collections dating from the founding of the University in 1837, a time when the University had no faculty or students, but did have a collection of plants given to it by the state legislature.

The fungi available for study at the Herbarium have increased enormously since the beginning of the 20th century through active collecting and gifts, one curator contributing 92,328 collections. Specimens include plant rusts, earth tongues, insect parasites, fresh water and marine fungi, polypores gasteromycetes, fleshy fungi from Idaho and Oregon, and even truffles and false-truffles from the Pacific Northwest.

The result is a collection of approximately 280,000 specimens: among the five largest collections in North America.

Recently added to that number is a collection of more than 7,000 dried specimens of Alaskan mushrooms donated by that state’s Wells-Kempton Herbarium. This northern herbarium and its collection is the result of nearly 45 years of work by Phyllis E. Kempton and Virginia Wells. The two found that although mushrooms in other parts of the world were classified, very little was known about the mushrooms of Alaska. The pair set out to rectify that finding. Twice a week during the summer months, the women searched parks, trails and campgrounds near Anchorage, collecting mushrooms and writing a brief description in the field and a more detailed description in the evening. During the winter months Kempton used a microscope to further describe the dried specimens. Eventually the pair traveled the entire state identifying mushrooms, building up the only mycological library in Alaska, and establishing the Wells-Kempton Herbarium.

The two mycologists worked as research assistants to U-M’s Alexander H. Smith who published several papers on new species of mushrooms based on the pair’s Alaska material.

That material now resides as part of the U-M Herbarium under the direction of Robert Fogel, U-M professor of biology and curator of fungi.

morelsRobert Fogel