107 ~ Love and fungus at Taliesin
This past week I guided a tour of Taliesin, and as I led the group outside of Frank Lloyd Wright's bedroom, the last space on the tour, there, in a small flower bed (with bleeding hearts), just several feet from the house, rose a lone, perfect morel. Remarkable.
Morels usually grow in association with the decaying roots of a few species of tree, yet here near the house there is nothing like that. It’s a morel outlier, as if this small miracle work of art was inspired to grow next to a larger one. And it has to be said - what a sensual arrangement, the morel stretching toward that that pink blossom…
Wright roamed these Driftless hills as a boy, he later lived at Taliesin for nearly 50 years, and he felt deeply connected to nature - in fact, he took most of his design inspiration from the natural world. He undoubtedly knew morels, and I wonder what he thought of them. Among other things, a morel's architecture is singular amongst all fungi, and Wright may have admired that. Who knows, maybe the hollow cone of a morel figured in his inspiration for the design of the Guggenheim Museum in New York:
And surely(!) the poisonous false morel, like this one I found a couple of days ago, must have been the inspiration for the other Guggenheim Museum, in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry.
The two architects probably never met (Gehry was just 30 when Wright passed away at age 91), but I suspect Wright would have taken wry satisfaction and a smile at the storyline - his Guggenheim resembling the true, nourishing morel, and his rival's a toxic imitation.
On a more general morel note, this damp, warm spring held such promise, but has thus far devolved into a disappointing morel season - making the lone, out-of-place Taliesin morel all the more intriguing. The disappointment has its roots, of course, less in the marginal numbers of morels I’ve found, than in my expectation, my demand, that there be more. The solution (and the challenge) is just to take some walks in the spring woods, leave expectations at home, and any morels I find become surprise gifts from the Holy. After all, we can't have miracles on demand. And that’s what makes the surprise Taliesin morel so special, including coming up so close to something else I love, that house. This one stalwart fungus has made this morel season a memorable one.
Some wonderful learning and nature immersion opportunities:
In the course of our lives, we all (hopefully) intersect on occasion with some gifted teachers. One of those for me has been Nicholas WazeeGale - characterized by the amazing depth of his knowledge of the natural world, and the humility and caring with which he shares it. I learn a lot every time I hang out with Nicholas, and enjoy it when I do. He has a series of upcoming classes here in the Driftless Area that might be of interest - one of them this coming Saturday. More information here.