Almost every afternoon sees the local turkey family getting their groceries at Farmers Fare—in the form of crickets in our field, and water and stone grit at our well. The recent fall rains have made our well full to overflowing, with a steady stream of several gallons a minute running out the top of the casing. Fox, deer, and even an osprey (picking up grass sods as a nest liner) are occasional visitors to the site as well.

September 24th, 2008: the brownish hen of the woods, or maitake, (top left) and the golden-white matsutake (right) are just what you’d expect to collect in late September, but it was a bit surprising to find the two bright orange lobster mushrooms this late in the season. All three of these species are choice edibles.

Here’s a closer look at maitake, or hen of the woods. An average cluster like this weighs five or six pounds, though some can weigh as much as fifty. The color can vary from almost white to gray, tan, sepia, or rich brown. This one looks to be made of chocolate—don’t you wish! Maitake is known to be an immune system-boosting mushroom, and has shown great promise as an anti-tumor agent—and unlike most medicines, it tastes great.

This photo shows three of the four key traits that will help you identify matsutake in our area: 1) It grows under hemlocks (note the needles); 2) The young mushrooms are very round, looking almost like a baseball emerging from the earth; 3) The cap is streaked with radial golden threads, giving it a bit of a metallic sheen. The fourth trait is its smell—photos aren’t much help there.

Act 1, Scene 4: Stalking the Rare Fruits of Maine
Each year in late August I find myself headed towards the mountains of Baxter State Park with my son Tom. Generally speaking, he goes there to climb on the rocks, while I go there to check out the plants that grow between them. Once we get above the timberline, both activities get especially interesting: Tom gets to hang by his fingernails in places most folks won’t go, and I get to see plants that most folks don’t know.

This year’s trip took us up Doubletop Mountain, which I think is the prettiest mountain in the whole state. Seen from a southern approach, it’s as close to a perfect pyramid shape as can be; the mountain equivalent of Bass Ale’s trademark. Mmmm. . . Bass Ale . . .

Now where was I—oh, right; the wild fruits that grow there. When you get near the top of Doubletop, after almost five miles of hiking from Kidney Pond, the trees get very small and some interesting berries start to appear. There are the usual lowbush blueberries, of course, but there are also bright red clusters of mountain ash berries, tiny black crowberries, and mountain cranberries. These last ones (Vaccinium vitis-ideae) are known by various names around the Northern Hemisphere; in Scandinavia they’re lingonberries and are a favorite for making preserves.

Though smaller than regular bog cranberries, their taste is very similar; perhaps just a touch sweeter, and with a very crisp texture. On this particular day (August 23rd) they were approaching ripeness, but since they are so firm and acidic they’ll be even better a month from now. One could easily pick several quarts of these with half an hour’s work on the open ledges around Doubletop’s twin summits, or for that matter on dozens and dozens of other Maine mountains, and that would be my idea of a great way to spend a late September afternoon.

Now, in the shady crevices behind the open ledges of cranberries, there was a much rarer fruit waiting for me: Snowberry, known to botanists as Gaultheria hispidula. This plant is a cousin of the familiar checkerberry or wintergreen (which happens to be Maine’s state herb, by the way). Its leaves are so small that many folks would mistake this plant for a moss, but it’s actually a very tiny prostrate shrub. Usually when I find snowberry plants, they grow in a dark spruce forest and form evergreen mats over the fallen logs. However, these plants growing on Doubletop’s summit seemed more vigorous than I’d ever seen them, and were bearing much more fruit than normal. The berries are pure white and often come in pairs, and their taste is a delicate cross between wintergreen and cranberry. I’d guess that if I’d been willing to pick for a couple of hours, I might have gotten a quart of snowberries— that may not sound very impressive, but then again prior to this I’d never found even a handful of them in one place.

So is snowberry the rarest fruit in Maine? Maybe in terms of how few people have ever eaten them, but in terms of raw numbers there are hundreds, if not thousands, of places in the state where the plants grow; we just don’t typically go to those places. However, upon my return to Knox County I found a fruit that I think is even rarer: Podophyllum peltatum, the mayapple.

Now we’re getting exotic! Mayapple is the edible fruit of a poisonous plant, which puts a certain edge on the tasting process. Add to that its very edgy common name, “American mandrake,” and you get the idea that this plant is something special. It’s also very rare, at least in my experience; the patch I found in Camden this summer is the first I’ve ever seen growing wild.

Each mayapple plant stands about eighteen inches tall, with a joint halfway up from which two leaves spring. At this same joint, a single blossom hangs down, and from this a round fruit develops. When fully ripe the fruit is about the size of a golf ball, and its color changes from green to yellow. It will feel soft to the touch and drop easily off its stalk, with a fragrance reminiscent of apples and bananas. The texture may remind you of a ripe fig, with a chewy skin that tastes mildly citric and a gooey center that’s like a crushed banana.

Opinions as to its taste vary widely, but that hardly matters; the point is to be able to let others know that you’ve tasted it, and they haven’t. The rarer the fruit, the greater its snob appeal. Imagine yourself tasting wine at some fancy soiree—you can swirl the glass, sniff it, raise one eyebrow, and say something like, “Interesting . . .  almost a note of early-season mayapple in its nose,” or whatever wine tasters might say. Who’s going to contradict you? I doubt that even Robert Parker himself has had mayapple, or snowberry for that matter!

Plant your dill every year, and by July if you look closely you’ll probably spot one or more of these lovely caterpillars enjoying it. This will turn into a tiger swallowtail (the yellow form with black markings), though we occasionally have the black swallowtail larvae in our garden too.