Goldenseal or Mayapple?

She was teaching me although I had taught myself it was a Mayapple: "Goldenseal," she said, pointing to a plant that looked like a Mayapple. Since then I've always doubted myself. Goldenseal (Hydrastus canandensis) or Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum)?

Decided today to settle it: This is the Divine Woods paved in jungly little ankle-high Mayapples, not Goldenseal. Both look like green umbrellas, are perennial and grow in colonies, but Goldenseal, a relative of the buttercup, has a bloom in the top center that becomes a reddish fruit resembling a raspberry; Mayapples have one white flower that becomes a single drooping ovoid yellow fruit beneath its flirty lingerie of leaves. Animals eat the Mayapple fruit; people get poisoned if they eat more than a little. The rest of the plant is otherwise intensely poisonous, especially the root.

Goldenseal is an endangered wild plant because folks rip it up from the earth to make a powder they say will let you ace your drug test. That is untrue. It too can be toxic. The Indians used it as a medicine but they knew what they were doing.

Both Mayapple and Goldenseal all pop up from one single underground stem. It might take years to establish Mayapple colonies as extensive as these. Colonies indicate that fertile earth lies beneath. Now I can relax, feeling sure of myself.

What Mayapples Can Tell You

Out on the morel-mushroom foray last week I made sure to join the group led by the man who'd been hunting mushrooms for 60 years because one must listen to one's elders. He pointed at a galaxy of mayapple plants in the middle of the woods and said, "That doesn't mean there's mushrooms there, but it does mean the soil there is rich." So it's a good sign that mushrooms could be nearby.

Could be near, because we didn't see or find any. Coincidentally on my own personal three-hour mushroom hunt on the Divine property today I didn't find any morels either. But I saw and traipsed through dozens of mayapple galaxies in search of my prize, and also experienced in the wild what my elders had told me:

• Look near deadwood, particularly downed and rotting ash trees.
• On downed and rotting trees and branches, the presence of Devil's Urn mushrooms that have popped open (pictured) is a sign that it is morel season and they could be near. Seeing Devil's Urns told me I was indeed looking in the right places, even if morels weren't there.
• Most fungi require a soil temperature of 50 degrees or more. (It hasn't been warm enough.)
• It's best to hunt on a slope, preferably a south-facing slope. In fact, don't bother looking at all for morels anywhere there is not a slope.

The previous tenants of this property said they invited a morel-savvy European to comb the woods for morels, but he found none. But now that at least 12 years have passed I gambled that there had to be some on 100 acres. I didn't find any today, but the journey, and the education, was my reward.