FIELD JOURNAL
Old stories,
red caps.
Folklore, history and botany of Amanita muscaria - no health claims, no instructions, just the record. The mushroom they all circle around is in the shop: buy dried Amanita muscaria caps by the gram, wild-picked in British Columbia and sold as botanical specimens, not for consumption, 19+.
Written by Eve Jung. Picking mushrooms since 2016, first in Europe, now in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia.
What is in an Amanita gummy? The label and the laboratory
In 2024 the FDA tested a recalled line of amanita edibles and found more in the packets than the label admitted. What that record says, and what is in a pouch from here.
How to Store Dried Amanita Muscaria - an archivist's guide
Air, light, heat and humidity are the four thieves of a dried specimen. Here is how a fly agaric cap keeps its brick-red colour and its structure for years.
Amanita muscaria & its look-alikes, a field ID guide
How to recognize the fly agaric with confidence, and how to tell it from the caps that copy its colour, a botanist's checklist, not a forager's.
Where fly agaric grows in Canada - shield, mountains and coast
A habitat map for Amanita muscaria: the trees it partners with, the ground it likes, the two-week window when the red caps rise, and the corner of British Columbia our own caps come from.
From Mario to the Mushroom Emoji 🍄, how the fly agaric conquered pop culture
A power-up, a Smurf village, a keyboard glyph on two billion phones: why the one mushroom everyone can draw is Amanita muscaria, and nobody notices.
Reindeer & Drum - Siberia's red cap
The steppe's oldest field note: how Koryak and Evenki tradition carried the fly agaric through winter, and why a red-and-white gift-giver still flies with reindeer.
The Red Cap in Church and Parlour - frescoes, icons, and Victorian England
From the Plaincourault fresco to Alice's caterpillar: eight centuries of the fly agaric hiding in plain sight - in chapels, manuscripts, icons and Christmas cards - and the fierce scholarly fight over what it means.
Baba's Forest - Slavic whispers
Мухомор: the fly-killer at the window, the trickster of the fairy tale, and the red cap that Slavic folk art never stopped painting.
Odin's Wager - the Norse thread
Where the sagas keep their mushrooms, why the berserker theory refuses to die, and what the north actually remembers about red.
Was Santa a Mushroom? The red-and-white theory, weighed
Flying reindeer, a red-and-white visitor, gifts through the smoke-hole: the famous theory that Santa Claus is a folk memory of the fly agaric - and what folklorists actually say.