Carl Bergstrom wrote:
- What conventions of color and form should we use when matching mushrooms and other fungi as accents to bonsai as primary display objects?
- Do fungi suggest places and seasons as accents plants do, and how can we make the most of this to create a sense of place in our displays?
- What kinds of display containers are appropriate? Based on your experience, small kusamono pots seem to be one reasonable approach; attractive pieces of hollowed wood seem to be another. What sorts of lines, textures, and forms should the containers have to complement the lines, textures, and forms of the mushrooms?
- What about mixed accent plantings, with both ferns/mosses/groundcover and mushrooms? When would one want this, and when one want to display a mushroom or set of mushrooms without plant accompanyment?
And forth; I could go on and on but I'm sure that better questions will arise as you develop the art of mushroom accents.
Carl,
A well thought out list of considerations that, of course, are the same for any type of plant used. Your own work with companion plantings have always been an inspiration to me and your resulting balance of color, shape, and texture have often left me in awe.
Carl Bergstrom wrote:
One final comment. For me, much of the delight of kusamono comes in allowing nature to take her course; much of the delight comes in "seeding" (by small propagules, runners, or seeds) the pot in February or March and waiting until June to September to see of one has a winner or yet another failed composition. One short-cuts most of this delight when one simply lifts a plant from a 4" nursery container and puts it into a kusamono pot three days before a show.
This has been a pleasure for me as well, the process of "seeding" a prepared container with spores from the desired mushroom and then waiting for up to a year and sometimes longer to see if they grew and fruit, to see if you were successful, takes an extreme amount of patience.
I have driftwood and pots full of compost and soil under my benches and in my shed that, for all appearances, appear to contain nothing but dirt 10 months of the year. These must be watered regularly and cared for carefully as, even though one can not see the fruit, they contain living fungus. Forget them and all is lost. Many of the species I attempt to cultivate fail and I do not find this out until a year or more has passed and they fail to fruit.
Carl Bergstrom wrote:
One thing that I really like about using mushrooms is that - given the difficulty of transplanting and the short-lived compositions that would result - working with mushrooms really forces the artist to let nature take her course.
This is appealing to me as well. Mushrooms can not be transplanted at all. They are disconnected from the fungus as soon as they are dug up or picked. One may lift them from the ground and arrange them in a pot but they are already deteriorating at this point. Some species will discolor and dissolve within minutes, others may look fresh for a day, but none will "take" as they do not have roots, they are like fruit, pick an apple and try to plant it in a pot...
Mushrooms that are cultivated in a pot, on the other hand, stay fresh much longer and as one fruit ages, new ones are pushed up. I often get multiple flushes of fruit in the same year, sometimes I will get three or four different flushed in the same pot, each different in number and location.
It is indeed wonderful.
Will