CMS Meeting – Feb 20, 2019

• When: Wednesday, February 20, 2019, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
• Where: Amazon Community Center, 2700 Hilyard St, Eugene, Oregon 97405

This event is free and open to the public. There will be a mushroom identification session. Bring what’s in your basket, edible or not, and learn from the experienced members of our community.

Since 1981 Ann Goddard has been foraying near and in the Siuslaw National Forest near her home, picking, photographing and drawing every mushroom she can find. Using colored pencils, she draws each mushroom in all its unique character, including dirt, and blemishes; as she has found these things can help her to identify the mushroom. Drawn to 100% scale and under consistent light, Ann prefers to learn to identify mushrooms from her drawings rather than from photographs, though she does those, too.   At this point, Ann has over 1080 drawings. Some are of the same species but under different conditions, showing their variation. 
     Sitka spruce grows in a very limited geographic area in the US, from Oregon to Alaska, only on the coast. In older spruce woods there are many Mycorrhizal species that occur, some perhaps unique to spruce and others, such as chanterelles that grow also among other trees.
      In this presentation, Ann will show a variety of species, edible and not. Some will be familiar; others will be unknown, from a variety of genera. People new to mushrooms should learn to recognize some valued species; experts can perhaps be challenged to help identify the many which Ann has yet to identify.  
     The last couple of years have been particularly dry in Oregon, yet for at least 9 months each year, one can still find fruiting mushrooms in the fog-dripping coastal forest. For February, this is perhaps the best opportunity to be around mushrooms for mycophiles.  Ann will have her original drawings to examine, as well as some photos of the same mushrooms.  

About the Speaker: Ann Goddard, pictured with the 2018 CMS t-shirt she designed, grew up in Oregon and has spent almost 40 years illustrating Pacific Northwest mushrooms. Assisted by some early training at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Ann’s seasonal obsession has been to illustrate every different fungus she finds near her home on the central Oregon coast. She is also a photographer and has kept photographs, field notes, spore prints, and dried samples of many of the mushrooms she has illustrated.  Back in the 1970s, she attended a number of mycological workshops and began trying to identify the mushrooms with the help of the likes of Dr. Alexander Smith, Paul Stamets, and others.