The Penguin

 You've seen them all along the roadside as you drive down Midwestern country lanes in late June, big tussocks of bright green, grasslike leaves; out of these shoot straight stalks, topped with orange or yellow lily-like flowers. Colloquially called "Ditch-Lilies", these plants are so ubiquitous as to elicit little comment; though colorful, their blooms aren't especially noteworthy, and just seem part of the landscape. You'd be forgiven for thinking they've always been here. But in environmental circles, ditch-lilies have a more sinister reputation: native to East Asia, they were planted for their flowers and ground cover, and then - as they are today - mostly forgotten. This allowed them to steadily proliferate wherever they were planted, quietly pushing up shoots every spring until, with little notice, whole hillsides are covered with the weeds. They grow virtually anywhere, crowding out native plants and compacting soil with their tubers. One eerie aspect o...

King Boletes or Porcini ( Wikimedia Commons ). Ha! The title is a red herring. It is not what you think. You were thinking, He means ingesting psychoactive mushrooms?  And the answer is...no. Not that interesting. Or maybe more interesting to different people. Who knows. I'm a wild-food nut, as anyone who knows me is rather nonplussed to discover. Even worse, I'm a bit of a mushroom fanatic. Every Spring and Fall I start getting a weird urge to walk out in the wet and buggy woods and poke around for hideous toadstools. I can't help it. Everything from Chicken-of-the-Woods to Giant Puffballs are on the menu here. The weirder, the better. This August blessed us with a tremendous amount of rain, meaning the outdoors are virtually inaccessible due to the preponderance of mosquitoes...but to a shroom-hunter, it means a bonanza. Spring is generally disappointing in Michigan; I've never had much luck morel-hunting, since they never seem to grow where they should, inst...